Lalo Schrifin's second most famous soundtrack after Mission Impossible (he also scored Dirty Harry, Cincinnati Kid and Cool Hand Luke among others) is this monster score for Enter The Dragon. The hit film is a perennial cult favorite that not only launched the Kung Fu Martial Arts Film craze in America but made its star Bruce Lee a legend due to his untimely death six months before the movie was released. But for avid readers of Wax Poetics, this score resonates amongst hip hop aficionados and sample heads alike for its thrilling combinations of jazz tension, funk breaks, wah guitars and far eastern musical motifs, not to mention Bruce Lee's battle cries peppered throughout. Hip hop and martial arts have often kept close quarters from Dolemite to the Wu Tang Klan, and this score just may be ground zero for the marriage of both those worlds.
HaiyaHHHHHHHH!!!!!
Wow, it's definitely Christmas around here and how can we tell? Well, for one thing we got this amazing new soundtrack reissue that we never realized until now we have been looking for most of our adult life. It's on Crippled Dick Hot Wax, one of our fave reissue labels that we haven't heard from in years and had feared they disappeared for good. And it's another lost gem from the proto-Can universe of The Inner Space, the same early group incarnation that gave us the soundtrack to the unreleased surreal-politico film, Agilok and Blubbo!
One of our favorite Krautrock obscurities compilations from years and years ago was called Kraut Demons Kraut and two of the tracks were credited to The Can, but didn't sound like Can at all. These were pastoral and pretty with flutes and guitar, one featured very folky female vocals by Margareta Juvan called, "I'm Hiding My Nightingale", the other track was called "Kama Sutra" (billed here as "Indisches Panorama I"). We had always wondered where those recordings had come from, and how they related to Can. It wasn't until someone put this on in the store after we just got it in that it all came rushing back. Those songs were from a rare 1968 German erotic film by Kobi Jaegar called Kamasutra: Consumation Of Love and were arranged and performed by Irmin Schmidt & The Inner Space, whose then lineup of Jaki Leibeziet, Malcolm Mooney and Michael Karoli was essentially the same line-up of Can's debut full length, Monster Movie.
But much of this is different from the Can we know (though the Malcolm Mooney-sung "There Was A Man" points at what Can was to become, and Michael Karoli's simmering electric guitar lines are as signature as ever), it even sounds very different from the other Inner Space release, Agilok and Blubbo. That soundtrack was more exploratory, improvisational and experimental, while Kamasutra is much more focused and musically gorgeous. Lots of sitars, flutes, acoustic and electric guitars playing slow-burning compositions with loping repetitive rhythms. Occasionally rocking out a groove, but more often wandering through many pastoral raga-tinged extrapolations. This is the most psychedelically kosmiche recording we've ever heard from this outfit, which of course gives it our highest recommendation!
M.C. Schmidt, for those who may not know, is Martin from conceptual electronic duo Matmos. And while Martin's other half in music and life, Drew Daniel, has been more high profile over the years with his side project, Soft Pink Truth (especially with last year's polarizing yet funny take on gay subtext and black metal, Why Do The Heathen's Rage?), this is Martin's very first solo record! Quite different from what we have come to expect from Matmos, Batu Malablab is a suite for prepared piano, flute and electronics that is nonetheless a beautifully captivating and transcendent listen.
Joined By Jon "Wobbly" Leidecker and Thomas Dimuzio, Batu Malablab explores the same Western fascination with Eastern music that has intrigued both populist and avant-garde artists for years from Martin Denny to John Cage. Using piano prepared in such a way to sound like gamelans, with passages of flute and occasional female voices and field recordings that extend over two side-long pieces ("Lowland Side" and "Mountain Side"), framed and nuanced after the geographical locations they reference. Toying with the once prevalent ideas of retro-academic musical explorations of exoticism while actually delivering a convincing record that exceeds the trappings of those said ideas is an amazing feat in itself, and Batu Malablab delivers both an exploration of imaginary global sounds and an incredibly deft composition in texture and feel that goes far beyond its referential touchstones.
First, before we get into the review, we should mention that this double lp is housed in an oversized French paper hand silk-screened jacket. While it's a beautiful package, the combination of its oversized shape and the delicacy of the material means it's prone to damage in shipping, and of course all the copies we have received arrived a bit bent up. The label has no replacement covers so this is all we're going to get. We've taken a couple dollars off the price to compensate a bit, but those who are more fastidious about the shape of their vinyl sleeves, might want to steer clear of this, as we won't be able to replace them. Sorry about that!
But WOW!, this is a beautiful double lp live set from 1972 by the late experimental kosmiche composer, Conrad Schnitzler. Salvaged from decaying tapes of a performance for an art exhibition, the sounds on this are like a multifaceted sci-fi ballet. The coordination of individual electronic sounds operating in harmonic tandem of each other showcases a brilliant array of synthesis and restraint, while at the same time emanating a warm centrally vibrant core. For some reason in some of our minds we always have this impression that Conrad Schnitzler was the most abstract and cold of the German musicians of this period, but lately with each new reissue that becomes available, that impression is proven wrong time and time again. This is a gorgeous set, as essential as any of his key recordings from this era. And as usual, crazy limited, ONLY 1000 COPIES and at this point almost gone so act fast!
We weren't expecting to like this as much as we do, but this record really kills!! His first recording in 16 years, Gil Scott-Heron doesn't overindulge, rather I'm New Here shows a much leaner and meaner side to this artist who has never had a hard time examining his demons. "Me and The Devil" is a contender for single of the year as this Robert Johnson blues classic gets a dark almost Portishead-like update. But this isn't just a younger makeover for a classic artist, it's closer in kin to the respectful reinvigoration of Johnny Cash's later American releases. The arrangements are spare, though inspired by the minimal chill of dubstep in parts, they suit Scott-Heron's tough spoken word turns that pepper the album throughout. The Bill Callahan-penned title track sounds like a world-weary folk dirge from the early seventies by Lee Hazlewood that is a stand-out among many
on here. A fine return to form!
We often get requests from Yoga Instructors and Massage Therapists for music suggestions for their practices that are ambient and relaxing, but not super cheesy as the stuff that is directly marketed to them. It's really not that easy. Sure someone like Anton Batagov, Lubomyr Melnyk, Pulse Emitter, Oneohtrix Point Never or the folks featured in the Kompakt Pop Ambient series might have some sounds that fit the bill, but there is often a certain level of distraction, emotive changes in tone, that take the listener out of their passive involvement and into active engagement and that doesn't always work in a bodywork kind of environment.
Recently, local musician and Psychic Arts label head Matt Baldwin dropped by these cds for a friend of his who runs Jacknife records in LA, who released this double cd of ambient works by Miles Cooper Seaton, known to many folks as a founding member of experimental rock collective Akron/Family. Seaton has been working for the past few years on exploring an idea of music made for a specific function, whether it be Satie's concept of Furniture Music, or the ritual music of religious sects and cults, basically music that is free of individualized emotive narrative instead leaning towards a concept of pure universality and purpose. Functional Music.
When we put on the first disc, or we should say first track, as each disc is just one long 35-40 minute track, we didn't know this was music designed with yoga in mind, though we could see it being used for that purpose, it didn't necessarily have the same kind of new age trappings that most yoga music always seems to have. But in fact, Seaton has been performing his solo music for large outdoor group yoga and visualization performances in various locations in Southern California and the Southwest for the past couple of years. "Echo" begins with a deep bassy meditative drone later met after some time with spacey synth high tones that cluster in loose buoyant formations and clanging resonant bells. Over time, the tones build and recede in subtle layers of sound much like the stratified layers of the geode that grace the cover of the album, moving ever farther outward. "Void" takes a deeper turn inward. Organ and synth drones combine in resonant overtones, eventually delving into an oceanic expanse that ebbs and flows in intensity as what sounds like bowed guitars begin to hover like approaching spacecraft ready to transport us to a higher plane. Incredibly cosmic, meditative and beautiful!
Dark Entries has done the post-punk lovin' world a huge favor in reissuing this dark wave gem from 1981. Second Layer was a side project of Adrian Borland and Graham Bailey of British post-punk group The Sound, that focused on a more detatched mechanized aesthetic driven by guitars synths and drum machines. Not too far from their main band's initial bleak anger at an increasingly militarized and dehumanized society, Second Layer seemed to be a better outlet for their darker (and starker) themes. World Of Rubber was their only full length, originally released on Cherry Red records, but this reissue is bolstered by the inclusion of their first two eps, State Of Emergency and Flesh As Property from 1979 and 1980, as well as demos from a self-titled compilation released in 1987, making this reissue a complete anthology of the project's output, and a revelation for listeners more familiar with The Sound. Essential!!!
We made the cd reissue of this a Record Of The Week back on list #265... then Too Pure let it go out of print again (twice)! But now, it's been reissued on vinyl by Modern Classics, a subsidiary of Medical Records, yay. Please read on to find out why picked it as a ROTW:
God, we love this record! We've never stopped loving it. In the years since it was first released in 1993, it's never sounded tired or dated to us. Can't say that for a whole lot of other electronica records. So we are really glad to see our good old friend back in print again... We have been playing this daily since we got it, and we're surprised how many folks have never heard of Seefeel or experienced their incredible ocean of sound.
So what is all the fuss about, you say?
Well, Seefeel at their peak were one of the main players that spawned the nineties electronica genre, at a time when there were only Dance and Rock sections in most music stores. Their sound was a delirious mash-up between the shoe-gazing swirl of My Bloody Valentine, the machinic rhythm programming of Autechre, the ambient chill of Aphex Twin and the driving pulse of Stereolab, with an early hint toward the looping repetitions of William Basinski. They bridged ambient techno and indie rock by foregoing rock music's verse and chorus structures in favor of beats and loops wrapped inside icy motorik rhythms, industrial whirs, blurbs of female vocals and dubby bass lines. Like the best work of minimal composers, Seefeel's long-form compositions create a warmly hypnotic form of static movement that refused to fit neatly into music for either dance floors or chill out lounges.
Quique was their head-turning debut following two EP releases featuring remixes by Aphex Twin. That connection surely gained them a bigger following, but Seefeel was always one of those bands that should have been bigger. Of course such a potent and influential debut would lead to many of their contemporaries, bands such as Bowery Electric, Labradford, Boards Of Canada and Flying Saucer Attack, to take Seefeel's initial explorations in sound further into Post-Rock, Trip Hop, IDM and Neo-Psych territories, leaving Seefeel at a bit of a loss for a follow-up. Signing to Warp, they delved further into a dark ambient direction in the vein of groups like Main, Ice and Scorn, that was just too stark for a wider audience to appreciate. They put out two more albums before splintering off into various side projects such as Scala, Disjecta and Sneakster.
Listening to Quique now, it has lost none of its powerful splendor and warmly chilled charm. Add this to the list of favorite one really really good record bands like My Bloody Valentine and Stone Roses. So amazingly awesome!
God, we love this record! We've never stopped loving it. In its fourteen years of existence, it's never sounded tired or dated. Can't say that for a whole lot of other electronica records. So we are really glad to see our good old friend back in print again with this super nice 2cd deluxe re-issue. If you missed this the first time around, then you are in for a real treat, and if you bought this the first time around, you may just need to buy it again to get the whole extra disc of unreleased tracks and alternate mixes. We have been playing this daily since we got it, and we're surprised how many folks have never heard of Seefeel or experienced their incredible ocean of sound.
So what is all the fuss about, you say?
Well, Seefeel at their peak were one of the main players that spawned the nineties electronica genre, at a time when there were only Dance and Rock sections in most music stores. Their sound was a delirious mash-up between the shoe-gazing swirl of My Bloody Valentine, the machinic rhythm programming of Autechre, the ambient chill of Aphex Twin and the driving pulse of Stereolab, with an early hint toward the looping repetitions of William Basinski. They bridged ambient techno and indie rock by foregoing rock music's verse and chorus structures in favor of beats and loops wrapped inside icy motorik rhythms, industrial whirs, blurbs of female vocals and dubby bass lines. Like the best work of minimal composers, Seefeel's long-form compositions create a warmly hypnotic form of static movement that refused to fit neatly into music for either dance floors or chill out lounges.
Quique was their head-turning debut following two EP releases featuring remixes by Aphex Twin. That connection surely gained them a bigger following, but Seefeel was always one of those bands that should have been bigger. Of course such a potent and influential debut would lead to many of their contemporaries, bands such as Bowery Electric, Labradford, Boards Of Canada and Flying Saucer Attack, to take Seefeel's initial explorations in sound further into Post-Rock, Trip Hop, IDM and Neo-Psych territories, leaving Seefeel at a bit of a loss for a follow-up. Signing to Warp, they delved further into a dark ambient direction in the vein of groups like Main, Ice and Scorn, that was just too stark for a wider audience to appreciate. They put out two more albums before splintering off into various side projects such as Scala, Disjecta and Sneakster.
The bonus disc contains six previously unreleased tracks, and three alternate mixes from a limited white label 12" and two ambient compilations. Out of the unreleased tracks, "Clique" sounds like it just barely missed the cut from the original album line-up while "Silent Pool" is a longer version of Quique's closing track "Signals". "My Super 20" and "Is It Now?" are long beat-less swims that are a warmer hint at their future direction and the two other unreleased tracks are versions of opening track "Climatic Phase #3, and "Time to Find Me" from their first EP. It might sound like at first listen that there is some repetition between the two discs, but it's really more in line with classic ambient music's infatuation with the Dub tradition of versioning, the adding or removing of various elements in a song to give it a totally different spin. Each version really does give a different feel even if the basic structures seem similar. Seriously, the second disc is just more of what you love already, and gives us a little more of the stuff we've been missing for ages.
Listening to Quique fourteen years later, it has lost none of its powerful splendor and warmly chilled charm. Add this to the list of favorite one record bands like My Bloody Valentine and Stone Roses. So Amazingly Awesome!!!! Reissue of the year so far and so totally recommended!!!!!!!!!
We actually originally discovered this record in a thrift store, years ago, and ended up buying it for $5 or whatever, just cuz the cover was super trippy, and it was printed on cool prismatic reflective paper, and of course, we had no idea what to expect, and while we dug it, a LOT, and listened to it constantly, for whatever reason, it never occurred to us that what we had was some treasured rarity lost psychedelic artifact, one that certain discerning producers have mined for killer breaks, until we found out this reissue was on the way. So we revisited the record and holy crap!!!! How could we not have known?! So insane, and inspired, and ridiculous, and over the top, and ahead of its time, and it totally out trip-outs almost any record we can think of! Needless to say, we're super psyched to have this reissue, which features that original record, along with a whole mess of bonus tracks!!
So the record proper, Lux Aeterna, was originally composed to celebrate a friend of William Shaller's wedding, thematically driven by concepts of union and togetherness, and ostensibly based on the Catholic mass, this is far from any sort of religious music you've ever heard. Following in the footsteps of other iconoclastic composers, like Serge Gainsbourg, Jean-Claude Vannier, Lee Hazlewood, David Axelrod, Scott Walker and of course Magma (more on that in a second), Sheller conjured up what is at once an over the top symphonic prog epic, but also a strangely meditative operatic chorale, the sound a gorgeous and dizzying fusion of bombastic prog, classical opera, tripped out seventies psych, outsider jazzfunk, and soaring symphonic majesty. The first track alone should convince you, with its groovy loping stripped down rhythm, its woozy bassline, its swoonsome strings, its slippery slide guitar (!!), its lush operatic vox. That cut is equal parts lost soundtrack and weird Morricone-esque krautfunk, sort of, the sound epic and dramatic and VERY cinematic, dark and subtly sinister, minor key and haunting, but then with about a minute to go BAM, the the sound shifts, sort of fractures, and gets super lo-fi, soaked in phaser and flanger, swirling and tripped out, laced with psychedelic wah guitar, a woozy, melting fad out groove. Holy WOW. So fucking awesome. And that's pretty much how the rest of the record plays out, with Sheller weaving these lush orchestral epics, alternatingly symphonic or operatic, when all of a sudden he'll mix in some trippy sci fi freak out FX or fuse rock drums to soaring operatic vox and symphonic strings. Some tracks play it totally straight, like "Ave Frater, Rosae Et Aurae", which really could have been plucked right out of a mass, but then in swoops "Opus Magnum Pt. 2", with its driving kraut-ish groove, reprising the opening theme, but adding some seriously loopy bleeps and bloops, squelches, and reverby blurps, tripped out laser fire squiggles and swirling analog electronics. Only to then settle right back down into some hushed string driven drift, but a minute or two later and the sound explodes again in a frenzy of FX, the song gathering momentum, and heft, and transforming into a sort of dirgey driving jam, wreathed in strings and an avalanche of glitched out electronics. And so it goes, slipping from haunting ritualistic choral music, to tripped out psychedelic seventies prog funk grooviness and back again, sounding quite often like Magma, or some similarly epic prog combo, stopping occasionally to dip into a bit of musique concrete or twentieth century classical, or introducing seriously terrifying children's spoken word, reciting what sounds like scripture, before finally finishing off with a gorgeous melancholy piano coda, again a refrain of that opening melody.
Quite a strange and twisted record for someone's wedding, sure WE'D all be psyched, but in 1972? Wow.
After a two minute track of silence, meant to separate the programs, comes, as the first of a big batch of bonus tracks, several pieces from Sheller's soundtrack for a 1969 film called Erotissimo, the music appropriately psychedelic and seventies hippie rocking, but of course laced with strings, and surprisingly some heavy proto metal riffing, wild psych guitar leads, dreamy female vocals, the whole thing building to a killer fuzzy psych rock blowout, before slipping back into something a bit more fuzzy and woozy.
After that is "My Year Is A Day", Sheller's big hit, a fantastic slab of orchestral pop, that reminds us of early Bee Gees and the Zombies, and fans of either/both will flip. The rest of the record is more of the same, fuzzed out psychedelic orchestral pop, "Couleurs" being a standout, with its freaked out effects heavy breakdowns, and sitar like buzz running throughout, but really all twenty tracks are killer, making us thing there must be a whole lot more William Sheller we need to track down. Maybe Omni will follow up with another reissue. Here's hoping!
Like all Omni releases, lots of photos, and extensive liner notes, as well as some weird unseen art and reproductions of the covers of some of the singles that are included as bonus tracks!
Wow!!! Most loyal AQ customers are pretty aware of our total love and adoration of almost all things Finnish, especially pretty much everything released on Finnish label Fonal. They just have not done us wrong yet. Islaja, Kemialliset Ystavat, Paavoharju, Es, the list goes on and on. And while for the most part their releases focus on the more murky free folk side of Finnish underground rock they have proven to be a label that isn't just about one 'sound' but instead are simply about beautiful music. Period. Whether it's random ethereal forest folk, dreamy drifty swooning ambience, or crunchy chaotic tribalistic clatter. Their latest release, from the Helsinki quartet Shogun Kunitoki, is further proof to that effect, and dare we say this might even be the greatest thing Fonal has released. Some of you may be shouting IMPOSSIBLE! And under different circumstances we'd be right there with you. But just listenening to Tasankokaiku has us thinking not only is it possible, it's damn near for certain. Color! So much vibrant color just bursting out of Shogun Kunitoki's instrumental onslaught. It starts out on fire and every song and sound just feeds the flame. It's almost as if Steve Reich and Terry Riley raised a child weaned on the BBC Radiophonic experiments, a young Rick Wakeman who grew up listening to the fuzzy guitarscapes of M83's Dead Cities, Red Seas... and the dreamy and propulsive instrumental jams of Stereolab, and thus cultivated a totally informed yet unique outlook and approach to music and music making. The sounds on Tasankokaiku are triumphant and assured, flickering then bursting, warm and so totally alive! Knowing how to perfectly use repetition to build momentum and then suddenly blast off to sparkling spaces that make you feel like you're being spirited away to a place that you've never been to but have always dreamed about. A sparkling glistening land of thick warm keyboards, hypnotic prog laced krautrockiness, Neu-infused soundscapes, basically a world populated by all the sounds that drive us wild. This is another one of those rare records that is an across the board unanimous AQ favorite. Everyone who works here loves it. We all hear different things too, besides the above mentioned bands, Andee hears bits of Goblin and Zombi and Heldon, Allan hears hints of Aavikko and Cluster and Circle, Irwin noticed a little Broadcast and even some Raymond Scott, but no matter what you hear, or what shades of sound reveal themsleves to you, the sum is SO much greater than its parts. A gloriously dense and warm world of fuzzy sound that we just can't stop listening to. No matter what music you've been obsessed with lately, this is one of those special records that somehow trumps whatever it is, straight to the top of your listening pile, elbowing it's way past all the other discs in your collection right into your cd player where it will effortlessly fend off any other records wanting to get in there. It's that good.
Only a few of us had even heard of this Scottish '80s indie sensation when this amazing reissue first hit our shelves but as soon as we listened we all instantly became huge fans and couldn't believe how they had managed to slip so far under our radar.
Coming out of the same scene that spawned The Pastels, this is really the precursor to the amazing twee and indie rock that would so dominate the underground music scene in the decade to come. Kind of like an impossibly amazing mix of Heavenly, The Vaselines and the driving spirit of early R.E.M. The songs of the Shop Assistants practically sound like the blueprints for K records. We have to believe folks like Beat Happening and The Softies had copies of this record when the whole International Pop Underground movement started up. We hear so much of our favorite indie pop sounds in this record: Magnetic Fields, Yo La Tengo, Belle & Sebastian, Electrelane, Vivian Girls, The Aislers Set, we could go on and on. It also makes perfect sense that Stephen Street engineered the record as it also fits so nicely sonically next to the records he worked on with The Smiths. The Shop Assistants can sound so dreamy and also so peppy and rocking, fully charming and irresistible without every being cutsey. This is a must have for anyone with a love for any of the bands mentioned above, indie rock, twee, dream pop, etc. Totally endearing and so damn good! If we have anything to do with it, Shop Assistants will no longer be the best kept secret in indie pop history. This is amazing!
NOW ON VINYL!!
Only a few of us had even heard of this Scottish '80s indie sensation when this amazing reissue first hit our shelves but as soon as we listened we all instantly became huge fans and couldn't believe how they had managed to slip under our radar.
Coming out of the same scene that spawned The Pastels, this is really the precursor to the amazing twee and indie rock that would so dominate the underground music scene in the decade to come. Kind of like an impossibly amazing mix of Heavenly, The Vaselines and the driving spirit of early R.E.M. The songs of the Shop Assistants practically sound like the blueprints for K records. We have to believe folks like Beat Happening and The Softies had copies of this record when the whole International Pop Underground movement started up. We hear so much of our favorite indie pop sounds in this record: Magnetic Fields, Yo La Tengo, Belle & Sebastian, Electrelane, Vivian Girls, The Aislers Set, we could go on and on. It also makes perfect sense that Stephen Street engineered the record as it also fits so nicely sonically next to the records he worked on with The Smiths. The Shop Assistants can sound so dreamy and also so peppy and rocking, fully charming and irresistible without every being cutsey. This is a must have for anyone with a love for any of the bands mentioned above, indie rock, twee, dream pop, etc. Totally endearing and so damn good! If we have anything to do with it, Shop Assistants will no longer be the best kept secret in indie pop history. This is amazing!
If Googoosh and Shirley Collins were somehow melded together into one incredible singer, you would have Shusha. Shusha was a Persian singer from the early seventies most famous for her debut album, Persian Love Songs and Mystical Chants from 1971. But her love of music extended beyond her native Iran towards the British folk of Shirley Collins and Sandy Denny and the American protest music of Dylan and Joan Baez. That is what inspired her on these two 1974 recordings, Shusha and This Is The Day. Reissued together for a very affordable price, these two albums of chamber folk-rock divide time between English-sung originals, covers and reworkings of traditional British songs and poems. No native songs here, the only inkling that we're given that Shusha is not English born is her woozy phrasing on some of the American covers such as Dylan's "Knocking on Heaven's Door" and the Elvis Presley social ballad, "In The Ghetto". But her singing really becomes transcendent on the British traditional material, where her range is allowed to soar around the song structures rather than being confined by them. This is an incredible discovery of two rare recordings by this amazing singer. Fans of Bridget St. John, Vashti Bunyan, and Joan Baez take note!
It's been awhile since we heard from Austin based one man band Silent Land Time Machine, not that Jon Roberts hasn't been busy. He runs his own Indian Queen imprint as well as co-running the fantastic tape label, Holodeck (from which we've reviewed releases by Thousand Foot Whale Claw, Smokey Emery and the other band Roberts does times with, the awesome kraut-psych drone outfit, Lumens). His debut, & Hope Still on Time-Lag, felt like a host of musicians in a full-on psychedelic Henry Flynt whirlwind, but all instruments were deftly played by Roberts himself. Here on this six song vinyl ep, he gives his compositions more space. With treated violin as his primary instrument, he carefully crafts beautifully layered psych-folk dirges that sound as if they were transmitted from some far-off place and time. Billows of static over looping and cascading filigrees of melody, murky percussive rhythms, and field recordings add to the songs' haunting remote quality. With harmonium and parlor piano on a song like "An Own To One's Room", it feels like some old west paean to days gone by. The long title, I Am No Longer Alone With Myself and Can Only Artificially Recall the Scary and Beautiful Feeling of Solitude, is a quote from Carl Jung, and it aptly describes not only the overall feel of the recording, but also the mysteriously romantic notion of how experience is shaped by continuous yet selective entanglements with the memories of our past. On 180g clear vinyl. LIMITED TO 500 COPIES!! Highly Recommended!
This is a hard one for us. On one hand we want to gush endlessly and write long paragraphs on how great this cd-r is, but on the other hand, this is a late discovery for us and we're not sure the band will be making any more copies of this. We got the last ten!!!!!! We don't really know too much about this band except they were local and recently relocated to Austin, and they revel in a sound that can be best described as shoegazey stoner country-rock. Thick, warm and gauzy with lots of reverbed slide guitar and heavy psych amp fuzz underscoring the female singer's pretty heavy-lidded and drawling vocals, the songs on Forces remind us of smoky perfumed parlors from a forgotten age. Reminiscent of a fuzzier Mazzy Star or a more heavier slow-rocking Beach House, Silver Pines has taken us all quite by surprise by their majestic grace and atmospheric beauty. So good!! Hopefully this won't be the last we hear from this band. Each cd-r hand silkscreened and colored. We only have ten! and we're not sure we can get more! You have been warned!
Oh, how we miss the "cassingle". Those two or three songs and perhaps a dance remix that would play on both sides of a cassette over and over again, burning those couple of songs immediately into our heads. And with its cheap cardstock sleeve instead of a case, for the time, before we got so super concerned about the environment, it was so happily disposable.
That's not to say this new 4 song cassette release by aQ faves, Silver Pines is similarly throwaway, but their choice of packaging (a black cardstock sleeve with unique collage elements) and the brevity of its length, just takes us back to those (not really) good ol' days. Made for their recent tour, this is a more lo-fi and blown out take on their majestic shoegazey Americana than we saw on the Forces cd-r (oh, and btw vinyl of that is coming soon!). In fact side one starter, "You Came To My Door", starts off very in the red, with the vocals and drifting guitar soundscapes near clipping out, but the sound issues are pretty much corrected by the second track "(I Believe In) Magic Dreams", a more spacious and slow-burning instrumental. Yet it's the second side that holds the real gold. Both songs, "Glass Church" and "Baby Universe" are stunningly beautiful and druggy ballads that are more strung out and psychedelic than anything we've ever heard from Hope Sandoval or Mazzy Star, the Pines most recognizable sonic touchstones. These two songs alone are worth the price of admission, but act fast, because only 100 were made and we only got a handful. So freakin' lovely!
This is so absolutely brilliant and bonkers, that when we first heard it, we thought it must be fake, some modern day Rephlex artist putting everyone on, taking the piss, with a "raga-techno" album supposedly from the early '80s. But, no joke, this is the real thing! In 1982, Charanjit Singh, a famous Bollywood composer (he was featured on Sublime Frequencies amazing Bollywood Steel Guitar compilation), had a plan to translate ancient traditional Indian classical ragas to the synthesizer. Using the very synths that would later define Acid House (Rolands TB-303 and TR-808!), Singh unwittingly created a proto-acid masterpiece, before the techno genre ever existed. Since only a hundred or less copies were made originally, this release was mostly a rumor since its creation. We vaguely remember Drew Daniel from Matmos talking about it on Pitchfork, a couple of years back, saying someone should reissue it, but we weren't ready for how incredible and ahead of its time it sounds. Imagine if Kraftwerk (or even Oneohtrix Point Never) started composing music for a Bollywood Rave. Or imagine a more raga-inspired take on another proto-acid classic, Manuel Gottsching's epic E2-E4. While the "disco" rhythms are fast and frenetic and don't really vary that much between tracks (they're not really disco beats per se, but more akin to acid's trancey bounce), the synth flourishes and squelches of the raga over the top are soaring and floaty, making the tracks deliriously hypnotic. Capturing acid house's lysergic transcendence but with an outsider's economy that refuses to date it specifically to the era. While we only have the double lp, there will be a cd release sometime in the next month or so. But don't sleep on the vinyl too long as it's highly limited, and we guarantee there is not another release quite like this one in your collection. Highest Recommendation!
Even if we didn't make this Record of the Week, we'd probably still be selling quite a few of 'em, as we're sure we've got a lot of knowledgeable record-collector-type customers for whom adding this to cart will be but the work of a second, the second after their eyes bug out upon seeing the artist and title listed above. But since this reissue is not only of an incredible rarity but also of an incredible record, we wanted to make sure everybody heard about it, besides those for whom it's already a "holy grail". Yep, Joakim Skogberg's original 1972 Jola Rota LP definitely falls into the highly obscure "holy grail" category, a lost treasure for lovers of weird, wonderful acid-folk and underground psychedelia. The sort of thing that develops a legend that it can't possibly live up to... but then DOES, blowing minds when it's finally reissued. The sort of thing that's whispered about among connoisseurs of psych, written of in a few select fanzines and blogs, heard only by a lucky few who got an Nth generation cassette dub or cd-r burn from a friend, who got it from a friend, and so on. The sort of thing, that even a few years after a brief exposure to its wonders, will make you stop and think every once in a while, dang when is someone finally gonna reissue that amazing obscure album??? Some other recently excavated examples would include Moolah's Woe Ye Demons Possessed, Bobb Trimble's Harvest Of Dreams, and Gary Higgins's Red Hash... and before that, once upon a time Comus's First Utterance too would have fallen into that category. Bruce Haack's Electric Lucifer as well, though originals of that were and are much MUCH easier to come by. Whereas *this* album was originally pressed in an edition of around just one thousand copies -- of which only a few hundred were ever sold back in the day, with the remainder of the pressing being, gasp, melted down to be recycled into other LPs!
So, here it is, artist Joakim Skogsberg's lone album Jola Rota finally, officially reissued for the very first time! Our hearts went pitter pat when we found out. We first heard this when our friend Loren Chasse (of Of/Thuja/Jewelled Antler/etc. fame) floated us a cd-r burn he had gotten from a pal overseas a couple years ago, as per the scenario outlined above. He figured we'd like it, and of course he was right. What's not to like? Swedish-forest-folk hippie ritual mixed with droned-out psych guitar. Truly strange, and captivating, vocal mumble. And, get this, it was actually mostly recorded out in a forest, on portable reel-to-reel gear!! Once out of the woods, the raw recordings were overdubbed (Skogsberg being responsible for all sounds on this album) in studio, but remain quite raw, the mystery and majesty of northern landscapes, dark shadowy places, placid lakes, tall trees and moss-covered rocks utterly alive in the music of the nature-loving Skogsberg.
Side One starts off with "Jola Fran Ingbo", which introduces Joakim's unusual "Jola" singing style derived from Swedish trad folk, also heavily influenced by Buddhist chant, accompanied by staccato bowings of ominous violin. Immediately this is waaaay darker than most other Swedish folk/psych we've heard! Seriously droney and austere. That's followed by the more freaked out, rockier "Offer Rota", which finds Skogsberg singing whilst pounding away on percussion and unfurling a thick layer of distorted guitar murk, with what sounds like a Jew's Harp warbling in the background. The next piece, "Fridens Lijor", on the other hand, is an unaccompanied vocal piece, close-miced and intimate, all about Skogsberg's fragile Jola babble...
Beginning side two, "Besvarjelse Rota" builds up a dubby, bassy electronic rhythmic whomp-whomp throb beneath its damaged psych guitar wail, that (in our warped imagination) foreshadows modern minimal techno a la Chain Reaction, "heroin house" beats.... could almost be Pole jamming with Algarnas Tradgard or something! Later, the lengthy "Jola Fran Stensate" harkens back to the solemnity of the album's first track, and then "Jola Fran Leksand" winds up this unique, amazing trip with something of a pagan campfire dance piece, for folky fiddle and rattling hand percussion.
Overall, though, Jola Rota's mood is solitary and ceremonial. Skogsberg not a guru leading his followers, but rather one man, inspired, singing devotional songs to nature, in personal communion with the ancient deities of Sweden and the universe... it IS universal, probably why it sounds simultaneously like krautrock and Tibetan worship and Native American prayer-songs. The universality of the drone, and the human voice in spiritual reverence regardless of language. At its droniest, many moments here recall Parson Sound or the aforementioned Moolah. Totally, magically mesmeric. Wow... EVERYONE who's heard this since we got it in has been entranced.
And we're extra happy that not only has this been reissued, but that the reissue was done by our pal Johan's Tokyo-based Tiliqua Records (along with EM Records, one of our absolute favorite reissue labels from that part of the world, or anywhere else). Which means, it's done up deluxe, packaged in a swank miniature gatefold LP-style sleeve, and it's been remastered from the original tapes with the help of Skogsberg himself. There's also new liner notes and previously unpublished photos of the long haired and bearded (of course) Skogsberg included. Nice! Sadly, this too is limited to a one-time pressing of only 1,000 copies... and unlike the original vinyl edition, we doubt the label will be left with any unsold copies to recycle!
FYI there will also be a super, super limited (and expensive) vinyl version of this coming on on Tiliqua in May, not sure if we'll be able to get any of those at all or if they'll be a label-direct preorder thing only...
Finally, we got enough of these to list, the darkly dreamy lp debut of Stefanie Franciotti's hazy and gauzy solo outfit, Sleep Over. A new light in the field of female-led synthesization, a la Laurel Halo and Maria Minerva, Sleep Over is a stunning mix of Grouper's washed out and oceanic distortion, Cocteau Twins-ish pop romanticism and uncanny gothic dream soundtrack. We've been fans of Franciotti since her days as singer in aQ faves, Silver Pines, but in Sleep Over she has found her true calling as an experimental sound composer, synthesizing voice and sound in chillingly bright sonic environments and ambient textures. Gorgeous!
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
SORRY.
It's a bit of surprise that we actually got some of these, and even more shocking that we got enough in stock to list, as we got the impression that we would NEVER be able to get very many at all, if any. But we did manage to get a handful, not sure how long these will be aroubd, but guessing not long at all... What's all the fuss? Well, Slow Walkers is in fact a collaboration between Liz Harris (aka Grouper) and Lawrence English - one of the preeminent ambassadors of Australian sound art; and their first fruits are as good as any of us had hoped. The album is dripping with all of the haunted, spectral atmospherics that Harris has brought to her Grouper records as of late, with both artists collaborating on the damp, dreary shadows of melody and drone that float, drift, and creep throughout. The two eschew the song and the voice in favor of a dark, lugubrious ambience that's probably got more in common with the morose tendencies of Cold Meat Industries than the ephemeral shimmer of Kranky, but it's totally entrancing and totally beautiful nonetheless. With this limited to 400 copies and sporting handpainted gold artwork, there's no need to belabor the issue. Grab it while you can, you won't be disappointed. And they'll be gone before you know it...
There is a very fine line between schizophrenia and a totally eclectic diverse creativity and we seem to enjoy music most when that line remains really blurry. This 2-cd set, recorded between 1980-82 by electronic alchemist Barton Smith definitely straddles that weird blurry line. One moment basking in tender beauty while the next moment flourishing into a noisy wall-of-sound. Very little was known about Smith. The fact that Smithsonian Folkways originally released these tracks on vinyl back in the early '80s, and still Smith remained a relative unknown, just adds to the mystique. The first disc opens up with what sounds like gamelan influenced percussion on homemade instruments, followed by pastoral pretty meandering guitar and then underwater sounding rumblings drenched in primitive sounding electronics. We have been totally intrigued and in awe of these recordings since we first got this set in a few weeks back. Listening to it nonstop, and trying to think about how this was received in the early '80s when even now it still sounds so ahead of its time. Former AQ-er Windy came in recently and jumped for joy to see this on the new arrivals rack, telling us how she scored an original vinyl copy years back at a flea market and it's always been a record she found so weird and wonderful and special. Outside of Windy, we haven't really come across anyone else who knew anything about Barton Smith. We've come to discover that these were recordings he made for modern dance troupes and we can only struggle to imagine bodies moving to his ever changing sounds. While for most musicians it can be tricky and problematic to change gears and sounds so often within an album, there is something so natural and lucid and smooth about the extremes explored on Reelizations. We can't think of many musicians who have the ability to explore such a wide range with this much success and intrigue. Moondog's versatility and eclectic output is someone who came to mind when trying to figure out how to classify Mr. Smith. From acoustic tranquility to electric outbursts this had us picking up on a totally diverse range of reference points: Sandy Bull, Jim O'Rourke, This Heat, Koji Asano. And for sure you could start seeing how years later groups would start exploring similar sonic atmospheres. Black Dice, Excepter, Loren Connors are some who come to mind. Scott even suspects that Kieren Hebden might have heard this at some point, as there is a really good chance that the Barton Smith track "Lotus" was sampled on the Four Tet album Rounds.
This is a record that we can't stop listening to or thinking about. We hear so much music everyday, when something kicks our ass this hard we know we've discovered something really special.
As with all releases on the fabulous Japanese reissue label EM, this is gorgeously packaged, coming in an oversized double jewel case, with a huge booklet, tons of photos and lots of liner notes -- those unfortunately all in Japanese.
A super limited lp only release from AQ fave Steven R. Smith (Thuja, Mirza, Hala Strana). This is part SEVEN in Important Records' "Arts & Crafts" series, and is essentially a brand new full length album. The sticker on the front name drops Popol Vuh and Arvo Part, and while we do hear some of that, we also hear lots of Nadja and Tim Hecker and Philip Jeck and that sort of foggy fuzzy dreamy drift. The magic of Smith is that he creates those impossibly gauzy sound worlds without a computer or loads of processing, just a bizarre arsenal of sound making implements and a dangerously deft hand. Fretted spike fiddle, fretted hurdy gurdy, psaltery, cello, xaphoon, bombard, ney, bouzouki, glcokenspiel, organ, hand drum, cymbal, shaker, noah bells, tambourine, kaen, melodica, electric guitar mandolute and tapes are all woven into a rich and washed out soundworld of wheezing melancholy melodies, thick slabs of distorted guitar crumble, haunting simple strums, thick low end reverberations all wrapped up in a dense sonic fog. Some ancient otherworld observed through old photographs or a dusty old oracle. Lovely and mysterious.
LIMITED TO 500 COPIES. Packaged in gorgeous hand screened sleeves, with an original linocut, created, printed, signed and numbered by Smith, affixed to the front.
What a find! We had no idea who Verdelle Smith was, but it only took one listen to this latest Omni Recording Corporation release, a compilation of her complete recordings to be, well, completely hooked. She only recorded music for two short years before disappearing from the music world altogether. But in a just universe, Verdelle Smith would have been as huge as Dionne Warwick and her producers and songwriters, Paul Vance and Lee Pockriss, more famous than Burt Bacharach and Hal David (though to their credit, they were already pretty big due to a novelty hit "Itsy Bitsy Teenie Weenie Yellow Polka Dot Bikini" and Perry Como's "Catch A Falling Star", but we digress...). Verdelle Smith's songs were no mere novelty. Originally from Asbury Park, New Jersey, Smith grew up singing gospel, but had big musical ambitions, so she moved to Manhattan where she auditioned for Vance and Pockriss who were looking for a specific type of singer for a Shangri-la's style song called "Juanito", a song about overcoming the social stigma of an inter-racial relationship. With high production values, lush orchestration, hook-laden arrangements and Smith's big voice, she fit the part perfectly and the duo recorded one lp and several singles, one of which "Tar & Cement" made it to No. 1 in Australia (which is probably why Omni is reissuing this.). That song and its B side, "Piece of The Sky" are both big pop laments to urban sprawl, and the dehumanizing effects of industrialization. It's rare to see such social issues being addressed in soul-pop fashion, and probably why they received little notice in the states. But Smith's drop-dead voice and the fabulous production give these songs such a deep, knife-sharp edge. "If You Can't Say Anything Nice" could easily have been a lost Bacharach / David hit. But it was the song, "(Alone) In My Room", that was quickly covered by both Nancy Sinatra (on the Boots record, no less) and The Walker Brothers, that seemed to secure her the most fame, fleeting as it was. Smith's delivery throughout her brief career shares the same dramatic largesse as Scott Walker on his first four solo records. So if you're as much of a fan of them, Nancy Sinatra, Lee Hazlewood, early Dionne Warwick or Burt Bacharach as we are, then Verdelle Smith will be right up your alley.
So what happened to her? Well, she wanted to make gospel records but her producers weren't into it, so she gave up the music business to become more involved with her church and social activism, which according to the liner notes she still actively pursues to this day under her real name. So there you go. Thank you Omni for digging this up. Fantastic!
Winter is coming, and this new sound piece by San Francisco-based sound artist and graphic designer Wayne Smith is the perfect soundtrack for when the weather gets colder and more intensely calm and still. Smith, more well known under his Aero-Mic'd moniker, is a master of miniature electronica and ephemeral detail, pairing blithe melodies with gentle atmospheres of drones, modular synths and field recordings. Here he creates a soundtrack for an art exhibition at local apartment gallery 2nd floor projects with the poet Norma Cole and painter Leonie Guyer. The resultant "Piano Lake" is a 14 minute piece of sparse chordal clusters of piano filtered through various effects, at times sounding like a strumming guitar with blurred ringing tones that are meditatively left hanging in mid-air. Far off in the background are what sound like footsteps walking by gently lapping waters, and occasionally a high keening synth phrase will whistle out and float above, but what is most apparent is the lavish amount of open space that frames these sounds in high relief adding a sense of devotional calm and seasonal drama. Like watching a quiet snowfall on a beautiful moonlit evening, this is the kind of recording you can just put on repeat and listen to for hours. Silent Night indeed.
Comes with a 15" x 10" poster on newsprint of a printed collage of floating cut-outs of various found objects Smith sourced from magazines and printed ephemera. Each cd-r comes in a plain white gatefold cd sleeve with hand-pasted collage elements. Limited stock.
Originally made as a tour only cd-r in 2011, the four tracks on Lives document the live sound of one of our favorite tape-drone artists as of late, Smokey Emery. Recorded on cassette and digital camera in warehouse spaces in San Francisco and Austin between 2006 and 2010, these long-form tracks take pieces made with multiple tape recorders plus the abundant room ambiance and filter them through a murky drift of concrete industrial drones, machinic whirs, woozy snippets of orchestrated music and murmured vocals. Subtle gauzy shifts in tones hint at underlying ghostly melodies, giving a glowing aura to the chill. Like a more shoe-gazing Indignant Senility, these live tracks tantalize in their blissfully gloomy gloam. Limited!
Volume II in Smokey Emery's series of live performance edits expand from the first volume into 9 pieces taken from performances over the last couple of years around Austin, Texas and Colorado. Adding to the industrial foggy ambience of Smokey Emery's sound proper is the fact that these recordings were made on low-fi tape recorders, cell phones and digital cameras, further murking up the cloudy din. Listening at low volumes might be akin to listening to your refrigerator hum, but turned up a bit, there are distilled blooms of haunted sounds, muffled dialogue and far off buried music. We had this playing loudly one morning in the store, the day after the election in fact, when we had a sudden cold snap after days of warm dazzling sunshine and the store took on this sudden charge of a soft industrial autumn haze that was chilling and melancholic, but also blithely peaceful. We guess we'll be looking forward to winter after all! Limited!
NOW AVAILABLE ON CASSETTE!
One of six new tapes from the always awesome Holodeck label out of Austin, Texas. Here is what we said about this Austin murkscaper's long out of print record when we first had the cd version back in 2009:
Austin-based painter and installation artist, Daniel Hipolito has been composing and releasing music in limited releases under the moniker Smokey Emery for awhile now. Composed of far away drones and loops, Hipolito builds his compositions like he builds his cave-y black and white painted installations and environments, cinematically, with a fine-tuned sense for mystery, vague longing and subtle dramatic flair. Like the lights of heavy traffic at sunset or a slowly sinking ship, there is an ineffable lonely quality to these compositions that is both beautiful and doomed, but fully engaging enough to still make us keep listening as the lights slowly fade.
This is the third installment reissued on cassette by Holodeck Records of Smokey Emery's great Soundtracks For Invisibility series. Based on field recordings from various locales and processed into tape loop constructed compositions, this series has always shown a deeper range between pieces. Recorded between 2006 and 2010, the trademark cavernous dronework here is augmented by degraded guitar pieces that bring a wondrous melancholy to the grey din. Vaguely romantic and tender, yet raw and chilling, a piece of gorgeously disquieting contemplation.
Comes with download code. Limited to 200 copies.
Austin-based painter and installation artist, Daniel Hipolito has been composing and releasing music in limited releases under the moniker Smokey Emery for awhile now, but we've only just finally managed to get some for the store. Composed of far away drones and loops, Hipolito builds his compositions like he builds his cave-y black and white painted installations and environments, cinematically, with a fine-tuned sense for mystery, vague longing and subtle dramatic flair. Like the lights of heavy traffic at sunset or a slowly sinking ship, there is an ineffable lonely quality to these compositions that is both beautiful and doomed, but fully engaged enough to still make us keep listening. Each cd-r is hand packaged with a unique photographic cover and wrapped in a vellum envelope. Lovely and Limited!
Volume one of Smokey Emery's Soundtracks For Invisibility Series (we reviewed Vol. 2, a couple of lists ago). Since we listed these out of order, Daniel Hipolito, the man behind Smokey Emery, repressed Vol. 1 just for us! Recorded in 2002, these tracks of cinematic drones and loops quietly build from slow-burning sonic embers to subtlety shifting drifts of piano, bells, and music boxes mutating into far-off whirring rhythms and wobbly melodic ellipsis. "Invisibility Vignettes" is an epic 16 minute track of 5 movements that lays out what sounds like a barren mechanical wasteland before a soft guitar and organ figure shines a small ray of humanity on the proceedings slowly evolving into an off kilter robotic heartbeat leading into the final track of a lovely far-off and decaying church organ loop. Lonely, Beautiful and of course Limited!
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
SORRY.
One of the Record Store Day releases we were most psyched on getting this year was this Flying Nun/Captured Tracks reissue of the first ep by NZ cult legends, Snapper. But they didn't show up in time for RSD like they were supposed to, thanks to a shipping snafu. Finally, however, our Snapper 12"s (along with The Bats' first ep, also reissued by Flying Nun via Captured Tracks for RSD) finally showed and we're so glad it's here now and we're able to share it with you, as we probably wouldn't have been able to write about it earlier, because we're sure they would have been all snatched up on RSD proper. So we only have about 7 of these left, and we're pretty sure they're gone for good, so act fast if you want one!
Released in 1989, Snapper was formed by Peter Gutterdige (The Clean, Chills and Great Unwashed) and featured Christina Voice on organ and vocals. The band would go through several lines-up but it is this ep that defined their sound for bands to come, a mixture of Suicide, Jesus and Mary Chain and a less campy B-52's with a farfisa driven hypno-psych vibe that predated Stereolab. Their drug-psych influence can be easily sensed in bands like Moon Duo and Psychic Ills today. Includes poster and original press release. So so good! Four songs. All killer!
Soft Circle is the long-awaited solo debut of former Black Dice drummer and visual artist Hisham Bharoocha. Channeling the cosmic meditative vibe of bands like Popol Vuh and Quintessence and filtering them through similar avant-rock tropes of his contemporaries, Animal Collective, Gang Gang Dance and Exceptor, Bharoocha has crafted a warm yet subdued inner space travelogue. Filled with sitars, tamboura, layered and delayed vocalizing, marimba repetitions and drum circles, Full Bloom sounds like the logical next step after Black Dice's 2002 release Beaches and Canyons. But Black Dice as a group would never have released something so transcendentally focused as Full Bloom, leaving no doubt that Bharoocha's departure from the band was all for the better. The music also complements Bharoocha's concerns as a visual artist nicely, sharing a multi-layered kaleidoscopic spiritualism loaded with tribal and ritualistic ruminations.
Recommended!
Ok, bear with us here... Might anybody remember Steve Trecasse? We're guessing the answer is no. He has been a small-time music producer, who worked at a time for MTV way back in the mid-to-late '80s. He was responsible for all of the music on the shortlived MTV gameshow Remote Control, but he also composed the theme song for the first incarnation of 120 Minutes. The show grew into a rather banal rehash of major label sponsored "alternative" music, but the early years had some genuine underground acts showcasing their videos. Live Skull, Swans, Sonic Youth, and Loop were some of the more atypical groups to get their videos on the air, alongside more conventional college rock favorites like The Sugarcubes, Love & Rockets, and They Might Be Giants. But that theme song hedged toward the darker, grittier sound through a throbbing electronic underbelly girding an air-raid siren guitar swarm which was not too far from a Skullflower (circa Birthdeath & Form Destroyer) / Sigue Sigue Sputnik / Joy Division hybrid as bafflingly awesome as that may seem. Another weird piece of trivia about that theme song was that it was performed by Trecasse with Doug Di Franco (who might just be Double Dee, turntablist Steinski's partner in crime) and Josh Braun (who seems to be the same dude who played keyboards in Circus Mort, which was Michael Gira's band before Swans). Anyway, that theme song proved to be more haunting and menacing than anything else that 120 Minutes dared to broadcast. It is a bit strange that a song that good, that dark, and that bleak would make it as a theme song for anything, much less for MTV. While that track is clearly something for somebody to dig up beyond an odd YouTube clip here or there, the fact remains that The Soft Moon has unintentionally arrived at this exact same psychic, sonic environment, nearly 25 years later, in an act of convoluted convergent evolution.
The Soft Moon is the post-punk / minimal wave project fronted by Oakland's wunderkid Luis Vasquez, whose eagerly awaited debut album is the perfect extension of his two teasing singles which emerged on Captured Tracks earlier in 2010. Guitars, bass, keyboards, drum machines, and a whispered vocal delivery all come together in a series of monochromatic, mechanical, and gloomy propulsions that fit within the current resurgence of Factory inspired alienation through sound. Amongst his death disco vibes and downer post-punk dirges, Vasquez has a knack for an icy noise quotient that glides through the springy basslines and taut rhythms. Layers drift throughout each song, building never as anything so garish as a solo, but more as a scabrous doppleganger of the songs arching mood. These are tonebent squalls of atonal screeches exhumed from a lo-fi murk and rinsed in pools of reverb, very much like those really early Skullflower recordings when Gary Mundy and Stefan Jaworzyn provided the twin guitar attack. Where Skullflower had a drug-fuelled nihilism at their core, The Soft Moon is more of an alchemist of gloom, doubling rhythms with staccato electronics and downtuned Killing Joke-ish basslines to what would have been a standard Goth plod. In many ways, it makes perfect sense that The Soft Moon has landed on Captured Tracks, as he's mining the same aesthetic surfaces of Blank Dogs, but where Blank Dogs holds back with a subtle irony, The Soft Moon fully embraces the gloom of this music; thus making this one of the best records of 2010 that everybody will be hearing in 2011. Awesome.
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
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Yes! The Sound of Feeling were a short lived but influential avant jazz-pop vocal group who recorded one full length album called Spleen in 1969 and a split LP with Oliver Nelson in 1968. Along with a handful of unreleased bonus tracks from the early seventies, Up into Silence collects their complete recordings. Comprised of pianist / arranger / singer Gary David, the counterpoint microtonal vocal talents of twin sisters Alice Rhae and Rhae Alice Andrece and rounded out musically with 2 bassists and a drummer, The Sound of Feeling updated the jazz-scat vocal style made popular by Lambert Hendricks and Ross and The Singers Unlimited by channeling John Coltrane and Thelonious Monk instead of Ella Fitzgerald or Louis Armstrong. But at times also referencing 16th-century madrigals, Bartok, the poetry of Paul Verlaine, as well as Simon and Garfunkel and Donovan amongst their many touchstones. Beginning with their take on Coltrane's version of "My Favorite Things", the first five tracks are from the split LP with Oliver Nelson. The four others are all originals including "Circe Revisited" which features the unusual instrumentation of Marxaphone, an autoharp type instrument with strings tuned to a microtonal scale. But it's their full length album, Spleen, where the group gets the most interesting. Opening with a bass and piano hook that has been sampled many times, the group's take on Donovan's "Hurdy-Gurdy Man" is one of the strangest and beautiful versions we've heard, taking the song through so many peaks and valleys (and even out on a few limbs) that never materialized in the original. With tracks like "Hex" and "Along Came Sam", it seems they left the jazz world altogether, and entered a lysergic avant chamber pop territory, with the basses, piano, vibes and drums alternating between killer breaks and restrained near-silent passages amongst the oddly tuned vocal acrobatics. The final 5 tracks were previously unreleased as the group were attempting to expand into hipper territories in the early seventies. The best of them, "Born Amongst The Eagles", continues with the amazing drum fills and some very strange vocal effects. Predicting the vocalese fusion style of Ursula Dudziak and Flora Purim, The Sound of Feeling were like a strange cocktail of Patty Water's Out vocals and the cool groove of Norwegian jazz singer Karin Krog. Their recognition is long overdue!
Who is The Space Lady, you ask? Well, among San Franciscans who were here from the late seventies to the nineties, many may remember The Space Lady's (aka Susan Dietrich) busking presence on the streets of the Castro. Wearing her plastic winged helmet with a flashing red light on top, and flamboyantly dressed, she would sing dreamy covers of popular hits ("I Had Too Much to Dream Last Night", "Major Tom") and some originals too, with just a Casiotone, or sometimes an accordion and a reverbed microphone, adding a cosmic flair to her sound. Always pushing her wares, she would often pause mid-song to passers-by and hawk buttons, tapes, postcards, all featuring her winged-helmeted profile - Scott here still treasures his original tape! Before San Francisco, she busked in Boston/Cambridge and has been seen in Berkeley too, but nowadays resides in Colorado, where she is still at it. She even travels to Roswell, New Mexico and plays often in front of the UFO museum and research center. Like other notable eccentric street musicians of San Francisco like Omer (notoriously known around the aQ neighborhood as Bum Jovi) and the loincloth-wearing violinist Thoth (who was the subject of an Oscar-winning documentary short), The Space Lady was previously featured in the Songs in The Key of Z compilations of eccentric outsider musicians. All three have moved on from San Francisco leaving our neighborhoods a lot less exciting (though in Omer's case, people are probably getting more sleep now). The Space Lady was the best of them all, and it's so awesome to have her music on vinyl for the first time. Perfect for anyone into the charmingly eccentric outsider sounds of free-spirited performers like Medico Doktor Vibes, Michael Farneti and Mij. Highly Recommended!
It seems in the past couple of years, electronic music pioneer Laurie Spiegel has gone from an obscure cult-figure to a championed celebrity right before our eyes. Thanks in part to a key sound design role in this past summer's blockbuster movie, The Hunger Games, but also to this incredible, and indeed expanded reissue of her 1980 debut release, The Expanding Universe, complete with an extra disc of bonus material from the period and extensive liner notes by Spiegel herself. Following key archival releases from fellow female electronic innovators Daphne Oram, Maggie Payne and Suzanne Ciani, we're finally seeing Spiegel getting her due for her stellar accomplishments as both captivating composer and inventor.
While The Expanding Universe was released in 1980, it was made up of musical experiments Spiegel made throughout the seventies in her off time as a research scientist at Bell Telephone Laboratories where she developed unique modes of combining interactive and algorithmic computer logic to the compositional process. Originally released on folk label, Philo, Spiegel's organic compositions had more in common with folk music than one would initially suspect. A trained banjo, lute and mandolin player, Spiegel's first released recording, "Appalachian Grove I" was included on the groundbreaking compilation of female electronic composers, New Music for Electronic and Recorded Media, where she applied the idea of an open tuned string instrument to her electronically created composition. The entire Appalachian Grove suite is included here and is an unlikely mix of John Fahey and Philip Glass, where banjo-like tonal arpeggiations become a rhythmically organic and pulsating layered stream of undulating sounds. With each piece Spiegel seems to strive to explore the boundaries of the compositional process with a determined zen like focus on how sounds interact and overlap. But this is not an academically minded process of willful bleeps and bloops. This is instead a carefully realized beautifully layered intuitive sonic constructions that rewards deeply concentrated listening. Easily some of the best and most effective second generation electronic music we've ever heard, which gives this reissue our highest recommendation!
Finally available on vinyl! After a tape and a couple 7"s, comes the much anticipated debut full length from this new crew of SF psych rockers, who by now should be quite familiar to fans of other Bay Area psychedelic space rock and garage rock, cuz if you dig Wooden Shjips, Moon Duo, Sleepy Sun, Carlton Melton and all the rest, as well as Ty Segall, Mikal Cronin, Thee Oh Sees and the like these guys should be right there in your space/psych pantheon. And while the spacier of those other bands tend toward the more droned out and krautrocky, these guys are much more classically rocking, melding a love of Spacemen 3 and other dronier drug rock with the classics, the Velvets, the Doors, even the Stooges, their songs simple and trancelike, plenty of jangle and simpler stripped down drum stomp, the vocals wreathed in reverb, and nestled in the mix, the guitars alternately chugging and crunchy, chiming and melodic, transforming simple pop songs into something more mesmerizingly hypnotic. Even album opener, Lonely Eye on the surface is simple and spare, but over the course of its nearly 5 minutes, it gets to the point where it could go on forever, and we'd sit there glassy eyed and blissed out.
Some of the other tracks are more garagey, like "Disguise", which should totally have Oh Sees fans flipping their lids, although the sound here hews much closer to old garage classics like the Fuzztones or the Lyres, which is most definitely not a bad thing. In fact if anything, much of this new record definitely leans toward that more stripped down garage rock sound, with fuzzy guitar, wandering basslines and fuzzy organs, but here and there, like on "Calling Out Your Name" the band unleash a riff that KILLS, in the case of "COYN", it's a dead ringer for the Stooges, one that the band could have ridden hard, but instead of getting all swaggery, the band sort of blisses out, applying multiple layers of guitars and upping the psych quotient considerably, not to mention some cool rhythmic weirdness, which lurks throughout the record, and reveals itself on repeated and closer listens.
And so it goes, the whole record, a killer collection of super hooky, spaced out psychedelic garage pop gems, the sort of sound we can't get enough of, and the sort of sound that should definitely position these guys alongside other garage/space/psych rock luminaries, and again if you dig Crystal Stilts, Thee Oh Sees, Wooden Shjips, or any of the other above mentioned bands, and have not checked these guys out, do yourself a favor...
Long before the group's most well-known hits, "Respect Yourself" and "I'll Take You There", The Staple Singers were one of the country's most self-made gospel singing family groups. Mississippi Records and Yeti Magazine have done us all a great service by reissuing the groups first three gospel albums from the late fifties and early sixties and they're all quite incredible. Led by Roebuck "Pops" Staples who wrote nearly all of their material and played guitar, and featuring his son Purvis, and daughters, Yvonne, Cleotha, and Mavis, whose incredible vocal range from deep lows to ecstatic highs made her the star of the group, the family began performing in 1948 in Chicago churches, the first performance at the request of Roebuck's brother Charles who just started a church and heard his brother's family harmonizing together on their front porch. They began in an acoustic folk-gospel style, harmonizing around Roebuck's twangy blues. He soon changed it up to electric guitar, and the tremoloed riffs as well as Roebuck's incredible song-writing skills gave the family's take on spirituals an incredible energy and feeling that was atmospheric, passionate and groovy. It's these early albums, more so than their mainstream funk and soul success of the seventies, that propelled the family into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1999. Embedded in their tight-knit harmonies, their cool soulful delivery and their infectious riffs, are the roots of rock and soul music. Uncloudy Day from 1959 is a collection of their early recordings at their most stripped down and their very first release. Will The Circle Be Unbroken from 1960 and Swing Low from 1961 are the group's first two studio albums augmented only by occasional bass and drums. All are absolutely essential!
Long before the group's most well-known hits, "Respect Yourself" and "I'll Take You There", The Staple Singers were one of the country's most self-made gospel singing family groups. Mississippi Records and Yeti Magazine have done us all a great service by reissuing the groups first three gospel albums from the late fifties and early sixties and they're all quite incredible. Led by Roebuck "Pops" Staples who wrote nearly all of their material and played guitar, and featuring his son Purvis, and daughters, Yvonne, Cleotha, and Mavis, whose incredible vocal range from deep lows to ecstatic highs made her the star of the group, the family began performing in 1948 in Chicago churches, the first performance at the request of Roebuck's brother Charles who just started a church and heard his brother's family harmonizing together on their front porch. They began in an acoustic folk-gospel style, harmonizing around Roebuck's twangy blues. He soon changed it up to electric guitar, and the tremoloed riffs as well as Roebuck's incredible song-writing skills gave the family's take on spirituals an incredible energy and feeling that was atmospheric, passionate and groovy. It's these early albums, more so than their mainstream funk and soul success of the seventies, that propelled the family into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1999. Embedded in their tight-knit harmonies, their cool soulful delivery and their infectious riffs, are the roots of rock and soul music. Uncloudy Day from 1959 is a collection of their early recordings at their most stripped down and their very first release. Will The Circle Be Unbroken from 1960 and Swing Low from 1961 are the group's first two studio albums augmented only by occasional bass and drums. All are absolutely essential!
Long before the group's most well-known hits, "Respect Yourself" and "I'll Take You There", The Staple Singers were one of the country's most self-made gospel singing family groups. Mississippi Records and Yeti Magazine have done us all a great service by reissuing the groups first three gospel albums from the late fifties and early sixties and they're all quite incredible. Led by Roebuck "Pops" Staples who wrote nearly all of their material and played guitar, and featuring his son Purvis, and daughters, Yvonne, Cleotha, and Mavis, whose incredible vocal range from deep lows to ecstatic highs made her the star of the group, the family began performing in 1948 in Chicago churches, the first performance at the request of Roebuck's brother Charles who just started a church and heard his brother's family harmonizing together on their front porch. They began in an acoustic folk-gospel style, harmonizing around Roebuck's twangy blues. He soon changed it up to electric guitar, and the tremoloed riffs as well as Roebuck's incredible song-writing skills gave the family's take on spirituals an incredible energy and feeling that was atmospheric, passionate and groovy. It's these early albums, more so than their mainstream funk and soul success of the seventies, that propelled the family into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1999. Embedded in their tight-knit harmonies, their cool soulful delivery and their infectious riffs, are the roots of rock and soul music. Uncloudy Day from 1959 is a collection of their early recordings at their most stripped down and their very first release. Will The Circle Be Unbroken from 1960 and Swing Low from 1961 are the group's first two studio albums augmented only by occasional bass and drums. All are absolutely essential!
My coworker Cup, whose tolerance for musical sweetness I can only admire and envy, thinks this new Stereolab album displays a lot more thought and effort, and is more intriguingly organic than their recent slick muzak leanings. And certainly the tracks featuring Jim O'Rourke at the controls are very nice. However, in my opinion (and I'm not Cup), this new album sees Stereolab
Kelley Stoltz is no stranger to John Dwyer's stalwart Castle Face label, where he has worked on various projects of other artists as a studio engineer and session musician behind the scenes, but In Triangle Time is Stoltz's first solo release on Castle Face and it's a beautiful match. We've always been big fans, but there is something so freeing about this album, more so than on Stoltz's last couple of records. Always well-versed in great production, perhaps it's 'cause of working with friends, and with less pressure, that his songwriting and studio chops on In Triangle Time just cut right to the chase. There is so much energy and drive here, with a keen focus on a glammy infectious psychedelia, that like a magician he pulls out of his bag of tricks one song after the other to our utter glorious amazement.
Forget Blur, Pulp and Oasis, The Stone Roses were the best britpop group ever! Well, maybe if we lived in a just world. Ultimately, their career fizzled early on, but their debut record and the array of singles they released around it still tower mightily to this day. Light in The Attic subsidiary, Modern Classics, just reissued both their superb 1989 self-titled debut and, for the first time on double vinyl, the singles collection Turned To Stone, originally released in 1992.
Indebted to sixties British mod forms but evolving them into dreamy psych-pop bangers, The Stone Roses' sound seemed to float around burgeoning "Madchester", britpop and shoe-gaze tropes just as those genres were being coined and defined. Yet they didn't quite fit neatly into a single scene. They had jangle guitar pop hooks, coolly detached vocals, psychedelic club-ready grooves, and a sublime intuitive sense toward a kaleidoscopic sonic production (the backwards tracking on "Don't Stop" for example) that was druggy and at times beautifully ethereal and arresting.
We recommend both wholeheartedly, the self-titled is no-brainer essential listening, but if you are looking for deep cuts definitely get the singles collection, which has the epic "Fool's Gold", a guaranteed dancefloor filler. The singles were where they really got to stretch out and experiment and collected together offers a deeper picture into their brilliantly ambitious brains, before it all vanished away.
For a limited time, we have the 'stone' colored vinyl of both!
Forget Blur, Pulp and Oasis, The Stone Roses were the best britpop group ever! Well, maybe if we lived in a just world. Ultimately, their career fizzled early on, but their debut record and the array of singles they released around it still tower mightily to this day. Light in The Attic subsidiary, Modern Classics, just reissued both their superb 1989 self-titled debut and, for the first time on double vinyl, the singles collection Turned To Stone, originally released in 1992.
Indebted to sixties British mod forms but evolving them into dreamy psych-pop bangers, The Stone Roses' sound seemed to float around burgeoning "Madchester", britpop and shoe-gaze tropes just as those genres were being coined and defined. Yet they didn't quite fit neatly into a single scene. They had jangle guitar pop hooks, coolly detached vocals, psychedelic club-ready grooves, and a sublime intuitive sense toward a kaleidoscopic sonic production (the backwards tracking on "Don't Stop" for example) that was druggy and at times beautifully ethereal and arresting.
We recommend both wholeheartedly, the self-titled is no-brainer essential listening, but if you are looking for deep cuts definitely get the singles collection, which has the epic "Fool's Gold", a guaranteed dancefloor filler. The singles were where they really got to stretch out and experiment and collected together offers a deeper picture into their brilliantly ambitious brains, before it all vanished away.
For a limited time, we have the 'stone' colored vinyl of both!
Wow!!! A few years ago, we were totally blown away by a compilation put out by Smithsonian Folkways called Indonesian Guitars, which among many amazing tracks happened to feature a song called "Fajar Di Atas Awan" by Irwansyah Harahap. It was of that disc's highlights, with haunting female and male vocal harmonies, lilting acoustic guitar, sruti box drones and cymbals. What we didn't know was that Harahap and singer Rithaony Hutajulu, both ethnomusicology professors at the University of North Sumatra, were the main composers and singers for a larger group of musicians and performers called Suarasama, and that song was the title track of THIS incredibly beautiful, blissful record by Suarasama, a 1997 live recording, now released for the first time in the U.S. by the fine folks at Drag City. We are so stoked, what a wonderful surprise this is.
Formed in 1995, Suarasama's musical influences are widely diverse, creating contemporary music based on vartious aesthetic and conceptual aspects of Middle Eastern, Indian, Sufi Pakistani, Eastern European, Southeast Asian as well as North Sumatra Batak and Malay traditional music. But the results are very far from academic. Instead the music is infused with a hermetic introspective devotional quality that seduces the listener with its soft trance-like rhythms and haunting vocal mantras. Persian and Indian percussion of tablas and defs meld with deft finger-picked guitar and gambus improvisations and dueling vocal harmonies that propel circularly forward in hypnotically beautiful interweavings. Meditative and organic, full of levitation-inducing majesty. For any devotee of raga folk, Masaki Batoh, Six Organs, Daniel Higgs, L, Robbie Basho, Sandy Bull, Congregacion, The Habibiyya, Malachi, Pandit Pran Nath, The Trees Community, or Bruce Palmer, this is absolutely essential!!
It's always pretty amazing when reissue labels continue to set high standards with rediscovered music. Especially when you think the well has surely gone dry, that they must have to heap loads of praise and hyperbole on a record that no one has heard of to get folks to buy it, only to have it not be as good as one hoped. That's what we were expecting going in to this 1969 private press Jim Sullivan record, when the label was describing it as a cross between Fred Neil and David Axelrod, two of our favorite musicians. While the description is somewhat apt, we couldn't help in our excitement over what we were hearing to come up with better comparisons like the Memphis swamp-folk of Tim Rose, the string-driven downer folk-blues of Tim Hardin or the lysergic folk-pop of Hoyt Axton (especially his debut, My Griffin is Gone). Needless to say, we are loving this record!
U.F.O. is a unique hybrid of Southern-fried world-weary folk with classic top-notch LA studio production sheen. Backed by the legendary Wrecking Crew, Sullivan's earthy but wide-eyed existentialism is cradled in stunning atmospheric orchestral arrangements that give deeper scope to the song's melancholic luster. Why this wasn't a major studio release at the time is a mystery because it sure sounds like one. But mysteries seem to have dogged Jim Sullivan throughout his life, as he strangely disappeared in 1975 in the New Mexico desert. His belongings abandoned, his motel room untouched.
Light in the Attic has done an incredible job of piecing together Sullivan's backstory and disappearance, but with no definitive resolution except for the legacy of one of the best lost folk records we've heard in a long while. Highly recommended!
Wow, did you know that the debut record by purported Peruvian princess Yma Sumac (1922-2008), was the biggest selling release of 1950? This isn't that album, Voice Of The Xtabay, though, rather it's her 1971 (yes, once again, 1971 blows the mind) rock-oriented comeback attempt, Miracles, this remastered reissue being the first time officially on cd for this rare record, which didn't stay in print very long originally, due to legal differences between Sumac and her label. So not so many folks heard this one, but now they can, if they dare!
While one could perhaps imagine something even more far-out from Sumac in '71, her fabled five octave range offering tantalizing possibilities for Yoko Ono or Brainticket style freakouts, this is definitely NOT your father's lounge music, either! Before titling it Miracles, they almost called it Jungle Rock, and it was definitely an attempt to introduce Yma Sumac to a new generation of fans. In this effort to be hip and happening, the inventive orchestration and contemporary rock band backing (fuzz guitars, swirling organ) come close to being as wild as her voice.
Interestingly, this album found the "Queen Of Exotica" once again teamed up with the "King" - Les Baxter, her collaborator on Voice Of The Xtabay! He was brought in to compose and conduct, and is responsible for writing all the tracks here but one (a cover of popular Peruvian folk number "El Condor Pasa").
These songs, with titles like "Medicine Man", "Flame Tree", "Azure Sands", "Zebra", and "Magenta Mountain", certainly showcase Sumac's remarkable voice - soaring altissimo, deep growling, startling squeaking, everything in between - as accompanied by swinging, fuzzed out psych rock grooves and otherworldly arrangements. Downright "lysergic" as some would have it. Others might call the combination corny... some of this sounds like the most unhinged nightclub act ever.
Leadoff track "Remember" sets the pace, Sumac's band ready to rumble, guitars crashing in like maybe she's gonna start singing "Jumping Jack Flash" but her vocals are all wordless whoops and warble (like a human Thermin) and ludicrous, Muppet-like grumble. Crazy stuff. This even reminds us a bit of the sort of Third World garage psych now being comped on such recent collections as Thai? Dai! and The Sound Of Siam, an interesting synchronicity. Who was unintentionally inspiring who?
It's hard to know what Yma Sumac purists will think about this over the top, modish Incan instro-hipster act. (Are there Yma Sumac purists?) This album's certainly a strange one, all right, utter extreme eccentric exotica. Exotic for the "jungle" themes, and all the more exotic now for its dated psychsploitation angle.
Brought to us by one of our favorite reissue labels, Australia's Omni Recording Corporation, who make sure provide extensive, fascinating liner notes (touching on this album's kinship with other albums of "psychedelic opportunism" of the era like Muddy Waters' Electric Mud, Bo Diddley's Black Gladiator, and Chubby Checker's New Revelation) in the colorfully illustrated cd booklet. Also, three previously unreleased bonus tracks have been added to the disc!
A few weeks ago, we listed Yma Sumac's last commercial effort, the incredibly awesome and strange lounge-rock hybrid from 1971, Miracles. So we thought this week we should balance that with her first major label release, the stunning proto-exotica of Voice of The Xtabay from 1950. Recorded with Les Baxter a full two years before his Ritual of The Savage album (which is widely considered to be the cornerstone release of the lounge exotica trend with many tiki bars and hula dance lessons to follow in its wake), Voice of the Xtabay still has an air of being somewhat authentic sounding, namely due to the otherworldly quality of Sumac's four and a half octave vocal range and her incredibly striking beauty that made it easily believable that she was actually descended from a true Inca princess (whether that was true or not has always been debated throughout her life and career and still persists after her death). A lush Technicolor fantasy of erupting volcanoes, chanting virgin maidens and jungle animal sounds, gorgeously orchestrated, Voice of The Xtabay is truly a unique record. The cd also features all the tracks from her Inca Taqui record from 1953 with her husband Moises Vivanco taking over the composer duties. Transcendent!
