For all the deserved attention and press the whole Los Angeles musical underground has been receiving in the last couple years, we still think that Sun Araw, aka Cameron Stallones, is perhaps the most unique musical visionary to come out of that scene. Beyond being so prolific, the quality of his proper records just gets increasingly better and better. On Patrol was one of our favorite albums of 2010, and with Ancient Romans, Sun Araw continues to move forward from that dubbed out blueprint and expand on what has become one of the most singular sounds of any new band of the last decade.
The moment the album starts, you immediately understand that you are at the beginning of a ceremony, some sort of stange sonic ritual, which requires the listener to open up to completely, wholly trusting in these sounds to carry you away. With dirty, hypnotic organs for the opening tones, setting the stage for the textured and layered dubbed out trip that will unfold over the next 80 minutes. More then almost any band we can think of, Sun Araw is a master of creating a unified vibe. The tracks on Ancient Romans just melt in and out of each other, you lose track of what song is playing, and instead just get lost deep in the fuzzed out grooves, and tripped out meditations. It's hard to explain when music feels this spiritual, it's just something you feel and trust. And with Sun Araw we get that feeling so intensely. It places you in some dusty, archaic temple that we could imagine was transported directly from Jodorowsky's Holy Mountain. Once inside the temple, you forget about the trivial details of the everyday, and instead leave your body and find yourself somewhere mystical, magical and totally transcendent. This is going to be a contender for record of the year!
Some deep and heady devotional vibes from this unlikely dream collaboration of Sun Araw, M Geddes Gendras and reggae legends The Congos for the latest installment of the RVNG label's FRKWYS series. Reminding us of a more churning and lysergic exploration of Dadawah's long form Nyabinghi jams, Icon Give Thank as this disc in the series is titled, turns the standard dub-reggae expectations on their heads and instead offers a strange brew of soft swells, smoky psych drift and oceanic dub interludes, punctuated by the honeyed falsetto vocals of elder statesmen Cedric Myton and Roydel Johnson from Congos. This release has garnered the most divisive stance of the FRKWYS series among us at aQ so far, with some of us considering it one of the better collaborations and for others a squandered opportunity smacking of colonialism. Granted, the sound design relies heavily on the Sun Araw side of the coin, but his approach is hardly "the white boy playing reggae" criticisms this release has occasionally garnered. The sound, for one, hovers hazily in the air like swirling smoke while the grounding bass is pushed back way in the mix instead of anchoring it rhythmically. Each member of the collaboration has come together on the premise of praise and invocation of thanks, making this project a more spiritual concern than just a good-times-get-high-let's-jam together record. By the end of it, we're in a completely different headspace altogether, in reverent clouds of the Divine.
And along with the cd, you get an hour-long dvd disc, called Icon Eye, a travelogue/documentary all about the collaboration process.
We won't go too deep into this review, because this is so limited and we likely won't be able to get more after we run out. Dedicated readers of the list know that we've reviewed tons of records from the far out jazz maestro Sun Ra (who may or may not have come from outer space) and his interplanetary Arkestra. So many in fact that it may be difficult to figure out where to start. Well, we've got the perfect introductory solution in this here tape mix. Mostly taken from rare '60s and '70s recordings, we've got cosmic synth stylings, solo abstract piano work, deep trip hop like grooves mixed with horn freak-outs, gospel vocal chants and even some Sun Ra speech insights, as well as beautiful call-and-response jams from Outer Spaceways Incorporated and beyond. The Oakland-based Sanity Muffin label has done an incredible job packaging this with different variations of the cover, hand decorated by Oakland school children and it also includes a faux card from Saturn Records, Sun Ra's record label who had offices in both Chicago and Oakland. Super limited so act fast!
Somewhere between The Free Design, The Incredible String Band and The Buggaloos lies Sunforest. Sunforest were a mysterious British female trio that recorded this sole 1969 gem of acid-folk prog-tinged popsike that has been a holy grail of sorts for sample-searching record heads. Even our own Antaeus (Lazer Sword) admitted to sampling the opening track "Overture To The Sun" to make a beat. That song along with another track, "Lighthouse Keeper" are also famous for their inclusion in the film "A Clockwork Orange". Medieval and baroque at times with harpsichord, piano and pump organ flourishes, lilting horns and sublime triple harmonies, Sound of Sunforest also features some of the best British session players around including Herbie Flowers (bassist on Lou Reed's "Walk on The Wild Side, Bowie's Space Oddity and Serge Gainsbourg's Histoire Du Melody Nelson), and Big Jim Sullivan (Lord Sitar) on guitar. Like most British records of the era, whimsy and zaniness can gain the upper hand at times with songs about candy shops, insect weddings, and eccentric old hippy ladies taking us back to the Sid and Marty Kroft days of our youth, but there is plenty of insanely beautiful songs of the likes we've never heard making this an odd but highly satisfying listen.
More divine modern shoegaze, we just can't get enough. Fergit Belle And Sebastian. Camera Obscura, who's that? There's a new yummy band in town who're giving those bands a run for the money and adding a healthy dose of shoegaze-y shimmer -- umm, but the town they're in is not actually Glasgow. Nope, these kids are a trio from Philadelphia, but Ben Daniels and his twin sisters Robin and Lauren sound remarkably authentically wooly tartan'd. From now on when you think of Scotland, you just might find yourself thinking of A Sunny Day In Glasgow. Scribble Mural Comic Journal is a swirlin' shoegazin' blissed out treat all awash with fuzzy guitars and dreamgirl vocals in the lovely tradition of Sarah and Slumberland Records. With heaping helpings of gauzy Cocteau Twins swirl and abstract deconstructed My Bloody Valentine buzz. Press 'play', curl up in a windowseat, and enjoy!
Newly Reissued on vinyl!
The Swell Maps were a brief late seventies / early eighties solar flare of totally brilliant, clattery, jangly, ramshackle experimental art pop like no one had ever heard. And without the Maps we definitely would not have had Sonic Youth or Pavement or about a million other bands. Fronted by brothers Nikki Sudden and Epic Soundtracks, Swell Maps were a bouncy Britpunk kick in the chin, mixed with druggy clumsy psych rock explorations, speaker bashing freakouts, hypnotic droney dirges, whiny snotty British vocals, brittle guitars, splattery drumming and and downright free-noise.
Jane From Occupied Europe was their second and final record from 1980. The band split soon after with Sudden forming the Jacobites and Soundtracks going on to join Crime And The City Solution. Download card included!
Symbol is the incredible debut solo effort of Christopher Royal King, founding member and guitarist for epic post-rockers This Will Destroy You, as well as founder of the Light Lodge label which has brought us some of our favorite Austin scene releases by Pure X , Silver Pines, Survive and Sleep Over. Online Architecture is the latest release on Holodeck, and it's a perfect follow-up to the label's last release of Ssleeperhold's Ruleth, leaning on the more brooding side of ambient synthesis. Not quite as goth as Ssleeperhold or Troller, instead Symbol plays into the more Tim Hecker/ Fennesz side of faded and worn down sounds, cinematic and epic, but also remotely nostalgic and beautifully melancholy. Sound sources are parsed through multiple filters and blurred into psychic layers of damage and decay, yet still sound so intriguingly tranquil and elegant. Deep, slow and heavy, Online Architecture is a thoughtful and considered release, embarking on an introspective journey into what may be a futile future. Highly Recommended!
Also, maybe the coolest, most striking record cover / album art we've seen in YEARS!!
We're so happy that Light in The Attic reissued this, a stellar, newly remastered entry from 1967 in the amazing back catalog of one of our all-time favorite jazz guitarists from the sixties and seventies, Gabor Szabo. As a matter of fact, he was the first true guitar hero for Scott here at AQ, the reason Scott started playing guitar - thus Szabo is indirectly responsible for The Alps!
Releasing an amazing string of albums on Impulse, Skye, Blue Thumb and CTI, Szabo's masterful blending of eastern raga, gypsy and flamenco influences from his native Hungary with western jazz, mod, pop and rock influences created some of the most psych-inflected jazz grooves of the sixties. We suppose if you were only to get one of his records, Jazz Raga is arguably the best albeit strangest of the bunch. Featuring eight originals and three covers (including a version of the Rolling Stones "Paint It Black"), Szabo recorded the whole album with a group, including the funkiest of session drummers, Bernard "Pretty" Purdie, then overdubbed sitar on all but two of the tracks. Of course by this time, the sitar was becoming THE instrument of choice in western popular music to channel a mystical spellbinding sound, but the manner in which Szabo employs it in the overall compositions of the tracks here is at times, lyrical, dizzying and truly wacked out. For one thing, the sitar is never quite in tune with the actual songs, making some of the melodies seem a bit warped in a way which is difficult to pinpoint. It's not an off-putting effect, quite the opposite. The slightly off interweaving of tonal shades and melody lines actually enhances the otherwordly mystical vibe on what might otherwise be perceived as a psychsploitative gimmick. Of course Szabo's meticulously intricate but seemingly simple guitar phrasings don't need much help from the sitar (he wasn't called The Spellbinder for nothing!). The sitar just provides an elemental coloring allowing a deeper immersion into whatever Szabo is seeking out, whether it be a quiet call to focus ("Walking on Nails"), a monster mod groover ("Sophisticated Wheels"), or the introduction of one of his signature tunes ("Mizrab"), a driving mantra-like tune of tablas and hypnotic droning open-tuned guitars that never tires. It's a song he would return to a few more times in his relatively short career (he died in 1982). Hopefully, more of his great records will be reissued as lovingly as this. Includes a 40 page booklet with lots of notes and pictures. Highest Recommendation!
Two electrifying live sets from 1967 by the great Hungarian born jazz guitarist mark this latest "two-fer" reissue from Impulse. Mostly taken from a live set at Boston's Jazz Workshop plus three tracks from that year's Monterey Jazz Festival, this is a great introduction to the spellbinding work of one of the finest guitarists in jazz. Often weaving intricate gypsy-folk inspired guitar lines within Western and Latin pop standards and exotic originals, Gabor Szabo brought a mystical and sometimes psychedelic feel to modern jazz. His band during this time was also top notch, featuring guitarist Jimmy Stewart, bassist Louis Kabok, either Marty Morrell or Bill Goodwin on drums and percussionist Hal Gordon. While the pop standards ("The Beat Goes On", "People", "Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds, plus the Brazilian tunes, "Little Boat" and "Corcovado") are still pretty good, the real strength of the material is in the originals, especially the ambient "Space", the 12 minute work out, "Los Matodoros" and one of our favorite tracks ever, the beguiling and mysterious "Mizrab". Szabo recorded several amazing albums in the sixties and seventies for Impulse, Blue Thumb, CTi and Skye, including the great Jazz Raga, that we reviewed recently, having been reissued by Light In The Attic. This latest in Impulse's reissue series, which has also included lesser known records by Pharoah Sanders, Albert Ayler, and Alice Coltrane, stands out among our favorites for sure!
Conceived as a soundtrack for a 1980 Amnesty International short film against the Death Penalty, French electronic music maverick, Bernard Szajner (pronounced Shy-nerr) came up with one of the most geniusly bizarre concept records ever made. Imagine if Suicide, David Bowie, Conrad Schnitzler, Bruce Haack, Giorgio Moroder, and Magma made a record together about the de-humanizing extremes of an existentialist Death Row, it might sound something as cold and freaky as this! A minimal wave Magma is definitely not that far off the mark, as Szajner was the lighting and visual effects designer for Magma's live shows in the seventies, and Klaus Blasquiz and Bernard Paganotti of Magma guest here.
The opening track, "Welcome To Death Row" was featured on the awesome compilation of French coldwave, "So Young But So Cold" and Detroit techno producer, Carl Craig has claimed this to be his favorite album of all time! It's definitely got the slow disco vibe down, even though it's hardly a dance record. Add some crooning David Bowie in his Low period moments, but it's way weirder with creepy synth elements, robotic vocals, radio collages, electronic pop and tight, proggy guitar solos added in to highlight a more distasteful side to what Szajner felt to be the all too pleasant quality of synthesized sounds coming out of Germany at the time. That might mean for some, on a first superficial listen, parts of the songs may go to questionable places you may not wish them to go (it was made in 1980, after all!), but it's a much more satisfying listen to follow the songs down all the rabbit holes they go with an open mind. It's definitely one of those eccentric missing link records that crosses through many genres but doesn't sit easily in any one of them.
Bernard Szajner made five records of avant-garde electronic music in the late seventies and early eighties before sadly abandoning music for good, but none of them are quite like this! (His 1981 follow-up Superficial Music has also been reissued and we'll hopefully review it in a future list.) But for all those into such sundry bands as Daft Punk, Droids, Cold Cave, Air, Kraftwerk, Heldon, Arthur Russell, Lindstrom, Gina X, Jonas Reinhardt, the weirder sides of Serge Gainsbourg or any of the bands or artists mentioned above, you need to check this out now!! Oh, and this also includes three bonus tracks, previously unreleased!
While virtually ignored upon its release in 1991, this continuingly influential album continues to elicit marvel from music lovers of all stripes. The final album from Talk Talk, the once New Romantic Euro-popsters turned introspective chamber minimalists, pretty much foreshadowed most post-rock music that would follow throughout the rest of the decade, especially with groups like Low and Movietone, but you can also hear the nascent strains of Tortoise and Labradford in there too. At the time, there was nothing at all remotely like this (and there really still isn't!), and though it didn't completely come out of the blue for the band (both Colour Of Spring and especially Spirit Of Eden clearly displayed minimalist leanings far away from the Euro-pop of their beginnings), Laughing Stock is a culmination of the reductivist sound the band through the tireless vision of its leader, Mark Hollis, had been striving for. Both Laughing Stock and Hollis' self-titled solo album from 1998 have been given the vinyl reissue treatment (first time ever on wax domestically) by the fine folks at Ba Da Bing. And since Laughing Stock is essentially a Mark Hollis solo album with a group of friends and session players, both records are more like essential companion pieces of measured and restrained beauty than any of the previous Talk Talk material would have been.
Said to have been inspired by Can and John Coltrane, though not sounding much like either of them, Laughing Stock instead trades on those artist's methodologies of musical structure, incorporating delicate textures and nuanced atmospheres into hushed but dynamically attuned elegiac compositions. The songs are stripped of excess, but are stylistically complex, mining elements of jazz and chamber music in finely-tuned and polished layers that build up slowly, with no verse-chorus-verse type of considerations or big overt payoffs. This is music that requires patience to appreciate but offers many rewards over repeated listens. A "long-tail" classic, this is one of our favorite late night listens. Completely and unabashedly essential!
Fewer things could bring more delight for us kraut and space prog heads than a 2cd anthology of Tangerine Dream rarities compiled by Edgar Froese, and for such an affordable price! Froese, the one mainstay of the band through 13 different lineups (the band including in their ranks at one time both Conrad Schnitzler and Klaus Schulze), has provided a compelling overview of the musical evolution of the band from their psychedelic roots to their later period as electronic film score stalwarts and everywhere in between.
The double disc set begins way back before TD, with their 1967 pre-incarnation 7" single as The Ones, a band more rooted in the sixties psychedelic rock of Jefferson Airplane and The Grateful Dead than the spacey sounds they embraced later on. But the real highlight of this set is the inclusion of TD's rare first 7" single from 1971, "Ultima Thule", an epic two part space rock excursion that begins in stratospheric Hawkwind territory in part one, but in part two takes a Magma like instrumental prog trajectory, that prefigures the minimal electronic direction the band would take through records like Electronic Meditation, Zeit and Alpha Centauri. The rest of disc one explores these sci-fi themed gaseous realms of gorgeous brooding ambience.
Disc two covers the bands' later, mostly early eighties output, which saw the band more as composers of action film music with a definte increase in rhythms and sequencers, but still with a spacey electronic edge. While John Carpenter may get all the credit as progenitor of all the latter day eighties arpeggiated synth worshippers like Jonas Reinhardt, Majeure, James Ferraro, and Umberto, Tangerine Dream was equally influential in this regard. A lot of the later period Tangerine Dream output can be sometimes cheesy, but the careful curation of this compilation shows there were also plenty of gems as well. This may prove to rethink the general attitude that TD had completely lost the plot, when they started turning to film score commissions, and rhythmic dance music in the eighties and nineties.
With one or two exceptions, most of this music here, as far as we can tell, has not been released on any of their major records, but there is little information to tell if these tracks ever saw proper release at all. So this is a very worthy exploration for the newly curious as well as for seasoned fans. Highly Recommended!!!!
Good God! We were always wondering if this would ever be released. Two of the best cuts from that (now out of print) Resurrection compilation of Christian psych-grooves we reviewed years back were from this crazy British jazz outfit, The Ted Taylor Organsound, sounding like the whitest of whitebread Protestant singers taking a deadly funky spin on traditional Church of England hymns. It was amazingly awesome and so damn silly at the same time! Finally, after many a fan's urging, Jonny Trunk finally reissued the whole record on cd (though in the liner notes, he states he won't bother making an vinyl version because of the prevalence of bootleg lps already - to which we say Boooo!). Turns out the singers are the Mike Sammes Singers who were a popular British singing group that worked with the Beatles and sang the theme to Stingray, and who have also been featured in other Trunk Records releases such as Music For Biscuits, while the band features some of Britain's finest jazzmen including Tubby Hayes, here on flute and saxophone. The best parts of these tracks are the intros, which are a gold mine for sample and beat heads. The gorgeously pastoral sitar and flute break that opens "Glorious Things of Thee Are Spoken" or the Latin percussion workout that unpredictably leads into "All Things Bright and Beautiful". Yet, once the singers establish the hymn structure, the songs tend to flatten out a bit as the melodic structure of hymns don't easily fit in the circuitous repetitions and rhythms of jazz and pop, making the goofier novelty aspects of this cd much more apparent. But if all hymns were sung like "He Who Would Valiant Be", we'd be in church every Sunday!
Love her or hate her, Lydia Lunch will make an impression on you. Given her venomous poems, constant invectives, and perpetual bad attitude, it's pretty obvious that Lydia wants you to hate her. While she's not an artist without her charms, she'll probably hate you for loving her. She began a career of transgression and teeth-gnashing in the mid-'70s when she was a runaway teenager slumming around the crappiest parts of NYC and pissing off more people than not. Yet, she managed to sequester enough people to support her in Teenage Jesus and The Jerks - one of the seminal bands who defined No Wave. They were also one of the four bands who appeared on the highly influential No New York compilation, alongside James Chance & The Contortionists, Mars, and DNA. Teenage Jesus only lasted for three years, probably due to the fact that no one could tolerate the musical dictator that was Lydia Lunch. But the music itself probably did a fair share of damage upon the participants as Teenage Jesus produced hyper-abrasive, hyper-condensed songs through militant rhythmic stomps, screechingly atonal slide guitars, and Lydia's sharply barked vocals. James Chance was in fact one of the early members of the band, offering his blood-splattering sax as a suitable duet for Lydia's caterwauling.
While Teenage Jesus never managed a full-album (well, they barely managed to clock in a 20 minute live set!), there have been a number of collections of Teenage Jesus tracks. The 2008 compilation, Shut Up And Bleed, is unique by including tunes from Lydia Lunch's other band at the time Beirut Slump. Some of these tracks had appeared on another Lunch compendium, Hysterie, released way back in 1988, but they've never been on cd. In Beirut Slump, Lydia played the part of the lead guitarist, leaving the vocal rants to Bobby Berkowitz, whose growling and grunts were uncannily similar to those of Michael Gira on the early Swans records. With the dissonant organ stabs, scraped guitar noise, and jackbooted stomping, Beirut Slump must have been one of the unsung templates for Gira and Swans. Even 30 years later, this stuff is damn impressive.
We've been getting all riled up over some hot Afro-rock releases lately, first from those killer Nigerian comps put out by the Strut and Soundway labels and then The Peace's Black Power reissue. But the lo-fi fuzz that's really rocking our world is this gem from Chrissy Zebby Tembo & Ngozi family, 1974's My Ancestors. Though included on the Love Peace and Poetry African psych compilation, Chrissy Zebby Tembo may not be so memorable from that because their track was the one instrumental track from My Ancestors, and though it's great, it's not as good as the tracks where Tembo sings. Like an odd hybrid of Malcolm Mooney from Can and Sabbath-era Ozzy Osbourne, Tembo's English delivery over these fuzzed-out groovers is the reason to take notice. Hailing from Zambia, same as The Peace and The Witch (another Afro-rock group we'd like to see get more affordably reissued), Tembo wails over these rhythmically charged but largely western-style rock structures. The best being the Sabbath gone to South Africa "Trouble Maker". In constant rotation, since this first arrived a few weeks ago, we've finally managed to get enough to share with our customers. Don't hesitate, this whole record kills!
We reviewed a previous, long out of print reissue of this, way back in 1999, saying simply and succinctly (as we did back then, we're more long winded now):
Outstanding psychedelic folk rarity with delicate female vocals, from Hawaiian trio circa 1973. There's just enough tabla, slide guitar, and Arp synthesizer to give it an 'edge.'
We further cited it as being one of then AQ-owner Windy's new favorites.
Well, These Trails apparently have fans over at Drag City too, 'cause they've just reissued it, on cd and vinyl, and we're glad to have this old fave back! These gentle, melodic songs are alternately sunny, sprightly and delightful, or moody and mellow, a bit country-twangy and tropical too, this album overall having a wonderful hippy Hawaiian vibe to it... As mentioned above, some strangely buzzing, burbling synth alongside the acoustic guitars and dulcimer gives the proceedings a darker, mystical feel much of the time, with tracks like the droning, melancholy "Hello Lou" being among our favorites. The vintage electronics, in combination with the lovely harmonized vocals, do definitely put this into a very special category of its own, even among all the privately pressed, mysterious one-album-ever gems out there, from the dusty past.
Definitely for fans of Linda Perhacs, also perhaps imagine '70 UK folksters Trees on a Hawaiian vacation, on the beach at sunset, with a synth plugged in somewhere.
Perfect time to have this reissued, with the ongoing acid folk and New Age revival, lots of folks haven't heard this before and are gonna LOVE it. We should have had it on our Summer Special last inbetween list, come to think of it. So check it out, and hang loose, very loose, with These Trails.
Maybe Drag City will reissue The Enlightening Beam of Axonda, next...?
By the way, amazing that These Trails somehow anticipated the internet, by writing a song here called "Of Broken Links"... haha.
Tripped out sci-fi groove-rockers from Austin, Thousand Foot Whale Claw make their vinyl debut, and it's even better than we hoped it would be! We sold through a bunch of their Holodeck tape, Lost In Those Dunes, which was typical of their tape releases, two long sides of heady space rock drift, explosive cosmic psych expansiveness and ambient nuance. But for their vinyl debut, they really take their sound to the next level in the rhythm section, adding more bass and drum groove into tracks that enter an almost psych-rave territory, as if Spacemen 3 and Fuck Buttons gave birth to a baby in the bleak vacuum of space. Like local hypno-rockers, Lumerians, TFWC take advantage of an arsenal of psychedelic styles that propel the momentum, but keep the energy fresh, exciting and interestingly unpredictable. A tremendous debut that comes highly recommended! Fans of Cave, Moon Duo, Carlton Melton, White Manna, and Wooden Shjips take note!
Wow! The latest from this large ensemble from Mali once again demonstrate that they are one of the best bands anywhere on this planet. Their mix of electric guitars with more traditional acoustic percussion comes just flows so naturally with an effortless grace and style that just seeps into your soul. After their great debut from a few years back and a tour of the states (their show here in SF at the Great American Music Hall is still burned into the memories of those of us who were there that night!) there was of course the natural concern that like much great music from the other side of the globe that finally reaches these parts, that some glossy western producer would try to get their hands on Tinariwen and water them down for mass consumption. Tinariwen actually don't need any of that to reach a broad audience as their songs are so well crafted as they are, and so filled with warmth and emotion that they're pretty impossible not to love. Recorded in just two weeks, there is an urgency and undeniable spirit to these recordings, capturing their sound maybe better then any past recording of them has. Their music continues to exude the essence of the desert and what it means to be a nomadic people. The way they are able to find the perfect groove and lock into it is what sweeps us off our feet every time we listen to this. We would love to see them play shows with Brightblack Morning Light, as Tinariwen's warmth and deep grooves would be the perfect match for Brightblack's infectious take on nomad blissed out blues. This is quickly becoming one of our favorite records of the year, one of those discs that we can just say 'get it' with the utmost confidence. And it won't take you long to understand why!
With all the Cold Wave and Minimal Synth reissues from the late seventies and early eighties coming back in vogue, we knew it wouldn't be long before we'd see some goth, industrial and deathrock bands from that period being re-issued too. Tones On Tail weren't all that obscure, coming out of the ashes of Bauhaus who disbanded in 1983, but they were very short-lived, only lasting about a year before Daniel Ash and Kevin Haskins reunitied with Bauhaus bandmate, David J to become Love and Rockets in 1984. However, Tones On Tail produced an exceptional amount of material over one lp and numerous eps and singles. While best remembered for their club hit, "Go!", their output covered a range of gothic styles from gloomy pop to dark jazz, but always with an ear towards strong songwriting and evocative atmospherics. We always liked them a bit better than Bauhaus. Everything compiles pretty much everything you will ever need. So good!
With all the Cold Wave and Minimal Synth reissues from the late seventies and early eighties coming back into fashion, we knew it wouldn't be long before we'd see some goth, industrial and deathrock bands from that period being re-issued as well. Tones On Tail weren't all that obscure, coming out of the ashes of Bauhaus who disbanded in 1983, but they were very short-lived, only lasting about a year before Daniel Ash and Kevin Haskins reunited with Bauhaus bandmate, David J to become Love and Rockets in 1984. However, Tones On Tail produced an exceptional amount of material over one lp and numerous eps and singles. While best remembered for their club hit, "Go!", their output covered a range of gothic styles from gloomy pop to dark jazz, but always with an ear towards strong songwriting and evocative atmospherics. And we always liked them a bit more than Bauhaus anyway!
Weird Pop is a new double vinyl collection that covers most of the same ground as the older 2cd collection, Everything, with a few previously unreleased alternate versions of songs like the full original version of "Performance", the studio version of "Heartbreak Hotel", the single edit of "Go!" and the extended version of "Twist". But unless you want these tracks on vinyl, or you are a completist collector, you might not need this if you already have the Everything collection (which is also available to order from our website) as that features more tracks (24 tracks vs. 19 tracks on the vinyl). Nonetheless, it's always great to see one of our favorite bands get some more much-deserved attention!
One of our favorite analog electronic prog-hippie jazz-psych records from the magic year of 1971 has finally been given the reissue treatment, and it's a doozy! TONTO stands for "The Original New Timbral Orchestra", the first, and still the largest, multitimbral polyphonic analog synthesizer in the world. Created by Malcom Cecil and Robert Margouleff, the duo's first outing with their new creation was originally released on jazz flautist, Herbie Mann's Atlantic Records sub-label, Embryo.
The album was so influential that Stevie Wonder collaborated with the duo on several of his most essential recordings of the seventies including Talking Book, Innervisions and Fulfillingness' First Finale. It was also the instrument featured on screen and used by Paul Williams character in Brian DePalma's Phantom of the Paradise! The machine later became a key player in lots of eighties RnB, seemingly miles away from the soundscapery on this first record.
While Zero-Time acted largely as a showcase for what the TONTO could do, it's still a pretty killer record of synthetic cinematic prog groove, subterranean alien library funk and spacey folk electronic ambience. Over six tracks, there are several varying moods from sexy (there's a song called "Jetsex" after all), to blissfully solemn. The opener "Cybernaut" sounds like a movie theme for a sci-fi crime thriller, all foreboding and mysterious, while our favorite track is the floating space raga, "Riversong" which has strange treated vocal modulations that are completely sublime. Recommended!
The amazing, beautiful, anarchic, DIY psych-folk-pop of Tony, Caro & John's terribly rare "All On The First Day" LP (originally privately released in an edition of just 100 copies) has now been revived on CD for, hopefully, a larger audience! This comes to us from the label that's been responsible for bringing us those fab "Love, Peace & Poetry" psychedelic rock compilations (y'know, the Latin American one, the Asian one, the Japanese one, etc.). Among the most recent installments in that series was a disc devoted to British psychedelic obscurities. One of that comp's highlights, we all agreed, was a cut by this trio. That track, the amazingly Neutral Milk Hotel-ish "There Are No Greater Heroes" appears here as well, on Shadoks' reissue of Tony, Caro & John's entire sole album, from 1972. Now, we know that a lot of the time it's true that a great track selected for a compilation doesn't a great album make from whence it came...after all, the compilers are likely to pick the BEST song off an album for their comp. So we were wary -- but curious -- when we heard this whole album was being reissued. Happily, there's actually a lot of other great songs on here besides "There Are No Greater Heroes", although that one still reminds us the most of Jeff Mangum's stuff. Taken together, Tony, Caro & John's songs manage to strike a balance between creepy melancholy and kaleidoscopic pysch silliness. Not only that, but they have more than just a nostaglic vibe going for them -- they are good songwriters/performers with some delightful, weird ideas. Fans of the Incredible String Band and other British hippie folk psych of the period definitely need to hear this. Kudos to Shadoks for digging this up, and doing such a nice job of it too. The booklet has some charming color photos of Tony, Caro and John in their garden, modeling the latest in hippy fashions circa '72. There's also complete lyrics and liner notes from the band, who are still active making music together! AND, five bonus tracks appended to the album make this an even nicer find, consisting of stuff from the period that didn't make it on to the original LP, but *should have* (unlike the general run of bonus tracks!).
This Pathless Land contains five moody latenight multilingual tunes, and certainly leaves you craving more! Subtle, smoky and just a little bit mysterious and trippy. The second song "Western" is a definite stand-out bringing to mind the wonderful duets of Serge Gainsbourg and Francoise Hardy or Lee Hazlewood and Nancy Sinatra. In-store play never fails to draw more than a few customer queries. A very impressive follow-up to their Que Son los Trolls y en Que Nos Ayudan? cd from a couple of years ago!
Local quintet Troll has made a delightfully ambitious record. The flavor is sort of Pizzicato 5 meets Os Mutantes meets Amon Duul, and each song is a minor gem, albeit a little rough 'round the edges', with multiple vocalists, epic harmonies, intensely simmering guitar, and well-written, unpredictable songs, dynamic pieces that grow and develop within themselves. Being smart folk with wonderful taste in music (we should know: they're AQ-customers!), Troll describe themselves quite accurately: "The sound is a combination of hard Nordic and Spanish garage, mellow blissful euro-tinged psychedelia, Japanese tropicalia and ambient jazz. The languages sung on the album are Danish, Spanish, Japanese, French and English." Nice.
By their very nature, Moog records are inherently goofy. And to a certain degree, to modern ears, the Moog keyboard too just sounds kind of silly. There's probably not a Moog record, commercial or otherwise, that would convince the Moog haters out there otherwise. You either love that instantly recognizable sound or you don't. The other possibility is that somehow, you've never heard a Moog (or at least didn't realize you had since, those pesky Moogs pop up all over the place!) and in that case, it's a record like this that might just open your eyes and blow your mind.
That's the other thing with Moogs, it's what you do with them and how you use them. Plenty of modern outfits use Moogs, and in those groups the sounds they conjure up are more textural, thick undulating slabs of analog buzz and bleep, space rock is and has always been all over the Moog, but when it was first introduced, as a modern sound making synthesizer, people's first response was of course to try all sorts of applications, one was bound to strike a chord with the record buying public. So thus there was a glut of 'popular music played on the Moog' records, everything from top 40 to soul to rock and roll, and yes country.
Which brings us to Gil Trythall, an academic who ended up achieving a modest bit of fame (or infamy) for his renditions of classic country tunes, performed on the Moog, and collected on two volumes: Country Moog: Switched On Nashville, and Nashville Gold: Switched On Moog, both released in the first few years of the seventies.
Before these records, Trythall was a musical academic, creating experimental sound and performance pieces, music concrete, using light shows and tape manipulation, film projections, and all manner of sounds. He was convinced to try his hand at a record of country Moog renditions, and thus spent months buying 45s and painstakingly creating new sounds and his own version of classic country jams, and these are the results. And they are pretty fantastic, lots of faves, here transformed into something much more futuristic, at least seventies futuristic, anyone into Perrey & Kingsley know exactly what we mean. The rhythms and the tones of the Moog are so immediately recognizable, the sound warm and warbly, but also mysterious and magical, and just a little bit robotic, this disc opens with the Moog-ified "Foggy Mountain Breakdown" and it's a rapid fire totally silly, Moog jam, you can almost picture this as the soundtrack to some wacky montage where everyone's moving in fast forward (in fact elsewhere on this disc, Trythall tackles "Yakety Sax", better known as the Benny Hill theme, here transformed into "Yakety Moog"). The tones are clipped and relentless, woven into an alien robotic hoedown. Right after that there's Johnny Cash's "Folsom Prison Blues", with vocodered / Moog-ed vocals, and some buzzy crunchy Moog leads. "Harper Valley P.T.A." gets a woozy warbly makeover, "Orange Blossom Special" sound almost like a countrified ELP jam, and Trythall's version of "Wichita Lineman" is surprisingly sweet and easy listening-ish, the Moog muted and subtle, not difficult to imagine this as the music for some love scene in a Spike Jonez movie or something.
And so it goes. Moog obsessives, fans of exotica and incredibly strange music freaks have probably been after these discs for ages, for everyone else, this is some wild wonderful, fun and funny stuff. And as with everything Omni puts out (like recent record of the week Plantation Gold, which this fits right in with as a weird country record), beautifully packaged with extensive liner notes and rare photos and artwork.
Tussle is an appropriate name for a group that has had as many line-up changes as it has records. With the addition of Tomo Yasuda (The Boy Explodes, Hey Willpower, Coconut) on bass stepping in for the departing Alexis Georgopoulos (Arp, The Alps), who in turned filled in on bass duties for the previously departing Andy Cabic (Vetiver), it looks like we're finally seeing a group beginning to gel. While their overall sound philosophy remains intact from album to album (highly percussive bass-driven disco rock), Cream Cuts shows the keyboard and synth tracks taking more of a lead role than on previous albums where before they mainly served as atmosphere. While still very bass and rhythm heavy, it has less of the post-punk disco references of Liquid Liquid and ESG and more of a trippier cosmic vibe of cinematic flourishes, spacier textures and idiosyncratic nuances that are a welcome development to this much loved local outfit. One small beef we must call out though is the tedious inclusion of what sounds like the band setting up in the middle of the record. Save it for the live shows, guys!
The first two eps by San Francisco's avant post-punk mutants Tuxedomoon get the reissue treatment by local (excellent!) reissue label Superior Viaduct. Both eps came out in 1979 before the band's Ralph records debut, Half-Mute in 1980. Formed by Steve Brown and Blaine L. Reininger who met in a City College electronic music class, they formed Tuxedomoon with the plan to be a band that sounded like no one else, and indeed they largely succeeded. Using a polymoog synthesizer, electric violin, guitar and saxophone, the duo enlisted a rotating line-up of musicians, filmakers and performance artists including Peter Principle on bass and Winston Tong on vocals, to make a weird hybrid of mutant jazz, goth-industrial atmospherics and noirish caberet styles with a live show that was both bizarre and highly theatrical. "No Tears" was their first hit and it remains today a classic Batcave goth-punk floor-filler, even if it may be somewhat of an anomaly in the band's overall sound, which leaned more towards an artier Throbbing Gristle than say Specimen or Alien Sex Fiend. They even do a subdued downbeat cover of "Nite and Day" by Cole Porter.
Their theater and avant-jazz leanings endeared them more to Europe than the states and they moved to New York and then Belgium shortly after their debut album was released. But these two eps are Tuxedomoon at their most experimental and exploratory and weird, fleshing out the dark corners of their sound with what Simon Reynolds called "an aura of jaded elegance". For fans of the SF underground, like The Residents, Sleepers, Noh Mercy, and Factrix. Both records come highly recommended!
The first two eps by San Francisco's avant post-punk mutants Tuxedomoon get the reissue treatment by local (excellent!) reissue label Superior Viaduct. Both eps came out in 1979 before the band's Ralph records debut, Half-Mute in 1980. Formed by Steve Brown and Blaine L. Reininger who met in a City College electronic music class, they formed Tuxedomoon with the plan to be a band that sounded like no one else, and indeed they largely succeeded. Using a polymoog synthesizer, electric violin, guitar and saxophone, the duo enlisted a rotating line-up of musicians, filmakers and performance artists including Peter Principle on bass and Winston Tong on vocals, to make a weird hybrid of mutant jazz, goth-industrial atmospherics and noirish caberet styles with a live show that was both bizarre and highly theatrical. "No Tears" was their first hit and it remains today a classic Batcave goth-punk floor-filler, even if it may be somewhat of an anomaly in the band's overall sound, which leaned more towards an artier Throbbing Gristle than say Specimen or Alien Sex Fiend. They even do a subdued downbeat cover of "Nite and Day" by Cole Porter.
Their theater and avant-jazz leanings endeared them more to Europe than the states and they moved to New York and then Belgium shortly after their debut album was released. But these two eps are Tuxedomoon at their most experimental and exploratory and weird, fleshing out the dark corners of their sound with what Simon Reynolds called "an aura of jaded elegance". For fans of the SF underground, like The Residents, Sleepers, Noh Mercy, and Factrix. Both records come highly recommended!
There seems to be a pattern these days with new bands, specifically the bands who exist in the cd-r underground. The scene is so small and the various labels and groups so closely linked, that it doesn't take much for a new group to blow up, a single well received cd-r on one label, often results in short order in releases on some or all of the various other cd-r labels of note. Sometimes it's frustrating, discovering a band, and then a month or two later discovering that they now have 5, or 10 or even 20 releases. But on the other hand, if it's a band you dig, why the hell not, we would never be ones to balk at more records by a band we love.
Anyway, such was the case with a band called Natural Snow Buildings, who released an insanely limited cd-r, in ridiculously fancy packaging. Practically no one got one, but those who did, raved like crazy, and thus, there are a whole mess of NSB releases about to drop (one elsewhere on this list actually). Not long after that release, half of that duo released his first record under the name Twinsistermoon, and pretty much the same thing happened. Insanely limited, only a few people got it, and word spread, and now TSM are also poised to release a handful of new records. Thankfully, Digitalis stepped in and snapped up that Twinsistermoon recording, and decided to reissue it, so more than a handful of people could hear it, and voila, here it is! Still probably too limited (only 500 copies), but at least briefly, we all have a chance to hear the gorgeous sounds of Twinsistermoon.
Mehdi Amaziane is one half of Natural Snow Buildings, and records on his own as Twinsistermoon. This disc was originally released as a limited run of 36 copies, which says something that it could still create such a stir. But it all makes sense when you finally hear it. This will be like manna from heaven for the dream-drone free noise cd-r set, the perfect mix of abstract folky songsmithery, and abstract raga like buzz, intense minimal tribalism, and shimmering soft focus strum. Even from the first track, imagine the cosmic Ur-drone of a group like Sunroof! intertwined with the fluttery forest folk of a group like Avarus, but then introduce soaring impossible high male vocals, often mistaken for a female, all woven into a buzzing brilliant sprawl. Peppered with bits of percussion, tinkling chimes, backwards guitars, almost Renn Faire like folk, those soaring vocals, hand drums, huge washes of vocal harmonies. Totally epic and expansive, cinematic and grand. And that's just the first track!
The record drifts dreamily from soft folky shimmer, to thick raga rituals. The vocal based songs are uncanny, Amaziane's voice is so high and clear, like Vashti Bunyan crossed with Cat power, the vocals rich and lustrous, emotional and intense, draped over fragments of strummed guitar, and muted percussion. Breathless and intimate, one moment, lush and epic the next, Amaziane could easily have made a record with just an acoustic guitar and his voice, instead, he chose to incorporate a much wider palette, creating gorgeous sweeping soundscapes, washed out drones, thick walls of crumbling distorted sound, steel string buzz would into long stretches of reverberation and shimmer, often erupting into dense tangles of buzz and pound, some tracks sound like a more lo-fi Loop, a sort of rambling forest-ified space rock, others are near static, channeling Sunroof! again as well as folks like Phill Niblock, but as much as we love dronemusic, and abstract buzzing ambience, it's Amaziane's voice that makes this disc so compelling. Anyone can whip up a good drone-y skree, although Twinsistermoon do it much better than most, keeping it musical rather than drone for drone's sake, but very few have a voice like that, and if they do, even fewer know how to use it. In Twinsistermoon, Amaziane transcends the idea of singer/songwriter, creating a gorgeously expansive and organic soundworld, equal parts free folk, abstract noise, minimal drone and hushed intimate songsmithery.
Packaged in a full color, matte finished 6 panel cardstock jacket, with super striking Aztec influence artwork by Amaziane. And again, LIMITED TO 500 COPIES!
It may be odd to single out one component of a series for Record Of The Week, especially when it's the second of a proposed three record trilogy. It's not that we didn't love the first installment, we did very much! And it's not like the Academy Awards where we're belatedly acknowledging the first installment by rewarding the second. It might be just that we didn't realize at the time the magnificent depth and far reaching direction in which Steven R. Smith would take his latest project. And as we have heaped tons of praise on his past work, we wanted to single out this project and particularly this installment as something utterly amazing and wholly breathtaking.
Despite the tons of killer music that goes in and out of the aQ doors, it's not everyday we get an album that really lifts us out of our seats and straight into an alternate dimension. The latest release under the Ulaan Khol moniker is a celestial trip into desolate plains where the water rises and the skies are ripped open.
A prominent member of the Jeweled Antler family, Steven R. Smith has been seriously influential in defining the California psych/drone sound for over a decade. We've mentioned it in plenty of reviews, so folks gotta be by now pretty aware of Smith's extensive discography, ranging from countless solo records to his releases as the Eastern European-tinged Hala Strana or with the famed JA flagship act Thuja.
The first Ulaan Khol record, though made up of nine untitled tracks, felt like one spacious drifting piece of big fuzzy distortion and fragile drone bliss. Something like the gorgeous feedback-laden free music of Les Rallizes Denudes or others from the Japanese Underground scene. We loved it a lot, but didn't go into extensive detail about it, probably because we had also just reviewed his Owl record (released under his own name) around the same time.
On II, we hear a lot more range. There are still the big swaths of massively distorted psych heaviness, but the eight untitled tracks feel more distinct and structured. Some tracks have faster Spacemen 3-like tempos and fuller driving progressions with pummeling drums mired way deep in the mix, while others feature more calm, drifty drones made up of intimate guitar, electric violin and organ passages that conjure up gorgeous swells of luminous sound. The pieces are more varied and layered, dense yet melodic and at times more rock-ish. The majestic guitar radiance Smith manages to create is not unlike the solo work of Kawabata Makoto or Tom Carter, but here we also hear shades of Roy Montgomery, Flying Saucer Attack and even Asa Osbourne from Zomes and Lungfish (Zomes being a recent Record Of The Week too).
As with the first disc, there are no liner notes, just an abstract painted cover, this time in bleak blue-grey winter tones. And inside the sleeve is an awesome painting of a lamp-holding monk (perhaps the same skull contemplating monk from the first disc) at the mouth of a giant cave! Yes!
Holy shit, this is so fucked up, but in all the right ways. And thus, becomes our first ever CASSETTE Record Of The Week! One of those records that had EVERYone here sorta freaking out. And on it's first spin in the store, had all the folks in the back rushing up front to see what the heck was playing!
Un Festin Sagital are an occult prog-metal / angular post-punk / psychedelic free noise / black ambient orchestra out of Santiago, Chile that can strip down to the touring essentials of just flute, acoustic guitar, and voice, when need be, in bellowing their complex tales of a forthcoming lysergic apocalypse. But here, it's the full sonic onslaught of Satanic chanting, frenzied tribal rhythms, heavy anthemic riffs, acid-crazed arrangements, and witch/warlock vocals that sound as if they were recorded at the wrong speed, all dotted with some rather pretty moments of psychedelic impressionism. Diabolically strummed flamenco guitar riffs erupt into blisteringly rhythmic assaults of start/stop rhythms that are equal parts King Crimson, Comus, and Uz Jsme Doma. Or imagine Dutch punks the Ex crossed with aQ Record Of The Weekers Yamantaka // Sonic Titan!! A sound that somehow simultaneously reminds us of bedeviled Eastern European peasant folk songs that could very well be possessed gypsy curses from some remote old world village in a muddled sonic palette that also evokes the Art Bears mixed with ritualistic Hindustani vocal modulations, or the Vietnamese girls on Holgar Czukay's "Boat Woman Song". The sound washed out under layers of tape decay and warble, the music seemingly patched together and reassembled in beautiful, yet twisted psych-folk interludes which meander between the volatile rhythmic outbursts with wah-wah inflected, acidic guitar lines and long dizzying sprawls of cinematic creep and kosmische electronics, creating spellbinding atmospheres and gorgeously stunning modern avant heaviness. Strange, fucked-up stuff. Supposedly a full length is in the works for Beta-Lactum Ring. C40. Limited to 100 copies! And so totally recommended!!
We've been listening to this nearly non-stop since we got our hands on a promo late last year. We didn't really know much about the backstory, just were totally floored by the consistently infectious hybrid grooves of funk, new wave, rare groove and jazz fusion recorded between 1979-1982 that it seemed impossible that this group was virtually undiscovered all this time by anyone outside of Chicago. Their sound fits somewhere between the edgy rhythm of Funkadelic, the rare groove of Roy Ayers, and the direct lyrical realness of Heatwave, but at the same time carries an unexpectedly sharp radio-ready pop sense, boosted by a laser-like focus on studio production and topnotch less-is-more musicianship. Learning their backstory after listening to this so much makes the whole thing that much more impressive and explains somewhat how a little known party band who amassed such an amazing back-log of never before released recordings.
Taken from tapes recorded in Columbia College's audio department recorded by college audio students at the time, The Universal Togetherness Band, somehow artfully finagled to get FIVE semesters of recording time to put to tape the band's entire repertoire, likely on the school's dime. For some reason a planned album release fell through and the tapes were shelved. Numero has done a great service with the help of mixing by Sean Marquand of Phenomenal Handclap Band to cull down eight solid tracks from the archive that spread themselves out genre-wise yet still stay tethered to the whole. Seriously, not a dud song in the bunch. Highly Recommended!
We've been listening to this nearly non-stop since we got our hands on a promo late last year. We didn't really know much about the backstory, just were totally floored by the consistently infectious hybrid grooves of funk, new wave, rare groove and jazz fusion recorded between 1979-1982 that it seemed impossible that this group was virtually undiscovered all this time by anyone outside of Chicago. Their sound fits somewhere between the edgy rhythm of Funkadelic, the rare groove of Roy Ayers, and the direct lyrical realness of Heatwave, but at the same time carries an unexpectedly sharp radio-ready pop sense, boosted by a laser-like focus on studio production and topnotch less-is-more musicianship. Learning their backstory after listening to this so much makes the whole thing that much more impressive and explains somewhat how a little known party band who amassed such an amazing back-log of never before released recordings.
Taken from tapes recorded in Columbia College's audio department recorded by college audio students at the time, The Universal Togetherness Band, somehow artfully finagled to get FIVE semesters of recording time to put to tape the band's entire repertoire, likely on the school's dime. For some reason a planned album release fell through and the tapes were shelved. Numero has done a great service with the help of mixing by Sean Marquand of Phenomenal Handclap Band to cull down eight solid tracks from the archive that spread themselves out genre-wise yet still stay tethered to the whole. Seriously, not a dud song in the bunch. Highly Recommended!
***MISSISSIPPI ALERT***MISSISSIPPI ALERT*****
Mississippi brings us another incredible collection, this time of Hindustani classical vocal music from 1930-1955 compiled from rare 78's. During the time this music was recorded, the British rule of India was losing its hold, and by 1947 India had become independent. So this is music made during much strife, from different regions. peoples and cultures that make up the population of India, a place Westerners tend to think of as a singular monoculture. Vocal music to most Indians is considered the higher musical art form over instrumentalists, because the range, complexity and connection to breath and life of the voice is the idealized standard to which all other instruments are based. In the voice, all the variants of cultures, regions and religions are represented and can be distinctly understood from each other and how they relate to the concept of a unified India. This beautiful collection of vocal music features both female and male singers both well-known and obscure (though they are mostly all obscure to us!) including Faiyaz Khan Hirabai Barodekar, Dattreya Vishnu Paluskar, and Bade Ghulam Ali Khan, with instrumental accompaniment of tambouras and sarods, that is dreamy, meditative and powerful. Comes with a booklet with photos and liner notes biographical and historical background of all of the singers, written by Ian Nagoski. Amazing!
Another winner from Sublime Frequencies. And while we made sure to stress that past "vinyl-only" were indeed vinyl only, lately, those vinyl releases have been slowly making it to cd. BUT, for the vinyl folks out there, these do disappear fast, and fetch big bucks on eBay once they're gone, so you're not gonna want to snooze on this one. Listening to this again, now, for maybe the 20th time in 2 days, it's becoming clear we'll probably have to make this a Record Of The Week as soon as it comes out on cd, but for now, even though it's only a highlight, it really couldn't be more of a MUST OWN.
And like many of the Sublime Frequencies before it, we find it hard to not think that maybe folks don't need to be making so much music, releasing so many records, when so much amazing outrageously creative music is already being and has been made all over the world, for so long, much of it never heard outside of a very few people. Maybe we should have some sort of national policy, where bands can turn in their instruments, and in exchange get a recorder, a plane ticket, and an expense account, with which they can roam the world bringing back some of that unheard and lost music. Heck, sign us up right now!
Anyway, this new release is a collection of Rai music from the early seventies, from Algeria, and these particular cuts are samples of some of the sort of "outlaw" Rai performers, a modern strain that has been neglected and ignored, and takes this classic Algerian music form, and adds electric guitar, trumpets, wah wah pedal, and whips it all up into an infectious brew equal parts Ethiopiques, Bollywood and garage rock. Or something close to that. This stuff is truly hard to describe, and the liner notes, while informative, are printed on an eye popping blue on red old school 3-D colored background which makes the text swim and sway before your eyes. And offer more on the history and the players than what Rai music actually is (there's a good description on Wikipedia). But for the purpose of this review, as it should be, we'll just focus on the sound. And what a sound!
Warm whirring organ drones, trumpets EVERYWHERE, really the defining sound, wild chaotic tribal drumming, crooned dramatic vocals, groovy, soulful, funky, raw and lo-fi, like a garage rock Ethiopiques, but with a strangely raw Bollywood vibe, the trumpets peppering the murky grooves with strange fanfares and jazzy melodies, here and there distorted guitars surface, wrapped in wah wah, reverb and echo all over the place, some songs super frenzied, others laid back and dreamy, Indian melodies draped over almost surfy grooves, really pretty fantastic. Hard to imagine that folks who have been digging all the Sublime Frequencies releases, or the Yaala Yaala reissues won't go crazy for this stuff.
Group Doueh, Group Inerane, and now this, a pretty mind blowing, near perfect, far out world music three-fer, and that's not even counting the 30+ release that came before. ABSOLUTELY RECOMMENDED.
LIMITED TO 1500 COPIES, 180 gram vinyl, super thick gatefold sleeve, full color, with tons of photos and liner notes inside.
Now on vinyl!
Analog Africa does it again! The hardest working Afro-beat reissue label brings us another amazing comp of psych-tinged, long-lost Afro-beat, this time from Ghana and Togo recorded between 1972-1979. Raw, sultry, and totally ass-shaking, pretty much all of the tracks have never been released outside the region. Funky Latin rhythms, organ-driven psych, and cosmic soulful percussive trance-outs by 11 bands. Comes with amazing 44 page booklet with pictures and histories. Wow, deluxe package, incredible music. We can go on, but do we really need to? Analog Africa hasn't let us down yet. 100 percent Solid! Trust.
Analog Africa does it again! The hardest working Afro-beat reissue label brings us another amazing comp of psych-tinged, long-lost Afro-beat, this time from Ghana and Togo recorded between 1972-1979. Raw, sultry, and totally ass-shaking, pretty much all of the tracks have never been released outside the region. Funky Latin rhythms, organ-driven psych, and cosmic soulful percussive trance-outs by 11 bands. Comes with amazing 44 page booklet with pictures and histories. Wow, deluxe package, incredible music. We can go on, but do we really need to? Analog Africa hasn't let us down yet. 100 percent Solid! Trust.
Hard to believe we never reviewed this massively influential set of archival recordings of American folk music when it was first reissued as a 6cd box set back in the late nineties. Perhaps they preceded our list, or we simply just relied on the fact that these sets so easily sold themselves at the time. Compiled by the one and only Harry Smith, a famously eccentric figure of American bohemia both as an experimental filmmaker, and collector and archivist. this set released by Smithsonian Folkways in 1952 in 3 volumes (the 4th volume was planned but never released until the early 2000's) reintroduced to the world some of the brightest stars of early folk and country music recordings of the twenties and thirties and lending significant influence to the folk music revival of the fifties and sixties. We're even quite positive that the cd reissues in the nineties influenced the next wave of folk music in the early 2000's. The Carter Family, Blind Lemon Jefferson, Dock Boggs, Blind Willie Johnson, Furry Lewis, Charlie Poole, The Alabama Sacred Harp Singers, and many more lesser known musical figures are to be found in these collections, exploring the full range of regional American musical forms from Hawaiian guitar to Cajun music, blues, reels and gospel. Mississippi Records has gone to great lengths to reproduce the original albums all on 200 gram vinyl. Each volume is a double lp, housed in a cloth bound super thick cardboard gatefold sleeve with a tip on print on the front.
Volume 4 was planned and collected at the same time as the first 3 volumes but not released. This shorter volume focused on rhythmic changes in folk, blues and country music that occurred from the late twenties to the early forties. John Fahey's Revenant label had released this volume in the late nineties, but it has long been out of print ever since. This is the only volume without liner notes as Smith didn't prepare any for this release. It includes Lead Belly, The Carter Family, Robert Johnson, The Monroe Brothers, Uncle Dave Macon, the Memphis Jug Band, and many more.
Sure they are pricey, but you won't see these around for long, such an amazing mind-boggling collection and all so worth it!
Hard to believe we never reviewed this massively influential set of archival recordings of American folk music when it was first reissued as a 6cd box set back in the late nineties. Perhaps they preceded our list, or we simply just relied on the fact that these sets so easily sold themselves at the time. Compiled by the one and only Harry Smith, a famously eccentric figure of American bohemia both as an experimental filmmaker, and collector and archivist. this set released by Smithsonian Folkways in 1952 in 3 volumes (the 4th volume was planned but never released until the early 2000's) reintroduced to the world some of the brightest stars of early folk and country music recordings of the twenties and thirties and lending significant influence to the folk music revival of the fifties and sixties. We're even quite positive that the cd reissues in the nineties influenced the next wave of folk music in the early 2000's. The Carter Family, Blind Lemon Jefferson, Dock Boggs, Blind Willie Johnson, Furry Lewis, Charlie Poole, The Alabama Sacred Harp Singers, and many more lesser known musical figures are to be found in these collections, exploring the full range of regional American musical forms from Hawaiian guitar to Cajun music, blues, reels and gospel. Mississippi Records has gone to great lengths to reproduce the original albums all on 200 gram vinyl. Each volume is a double lp, housed in a cloth bound super thick cardboard gatefold sleeve with a tip on print on the front. In the gatefold there is a pouch with a reproduction of the original liner notes (at least in the first three volumes).
Volume One is Ballads with focus on traditional songs handed down from generations that often originated from British and Scottish Folk balladry, but also includes murder ballads, songs of love and death and great tragedy. An Essential Collection!
Sure they are pricey, but you won't see these around for long. Such an amazing mind-boggling collection and all so worth it!
Hard to believe we never reviewed this massively influential set of archival recordings of American folk music when it was first reissued as a 6cd box set back in the late nineties. Perhaps they preceded our list, or we simply just relied on the fact that these sets so easily sold themselves at the time. Compiled by the one and only Harry Smith, a famously eccentric figure of American bohemia both as an experimental filmmaker, and collector and archivist. this set released by Smithsonian Folkways in 1952 in 3 volumes (the 4th volume was planned but never released until the early 2000's) reintroduced to the world some of the brightest stars of early folk and country music recordings of the twenties and thirties and lending significant influence to the folk music revival of the fifties and sixties. We're even quite positive that the cd reissues in the nineties influenced the next wave of folk music in the early 2000's. The Carter Family, Blind Lemon Jefferson, Dock Boggs, Blind Willie Johnson, Furry Lewis, Charlie Poole, The Alabama Sacred Harp Singers, and many more lesser known musical figures are to be found in these collections, exploring the full range of regional American musical forms from Hawaiian guitar to Cajun music, blues, reels and gospel. Mississippi Records has gone to great lengths to reproduce the original albums all on 200 gram vinyl. Each volume is a double lp, housed in a cloth bound super thick cardboard gatefold sleeve with a tip on print on the front. In the gatefold there is a pouch with a reproduction of the original liner notes (at least in the first three volumes).
Volume Three is Songs and focuses on the individual expression of various artists as well as beautifully intense and personal songwriting. This includes Blind Lemon Jefferson's "See That My Grave Is Kept Clean" and other classics of early blues and country. Incredible!
Sure they are pricey, but you won't see these around for long. Such an amazing mind-boggling collection and all so worth it!
Hard to believe we never reviewed this massively influential set of archival recordings of American folk music when it was first reissued as a 6cd box set back in the late nineties. Perhaps they preceded our list, or we simply just relied on the fact that these sets so easily sold themselves at the time. Compiled by the one and only Harry Smith, a famously eccentric figure of American bohemia both as an experimental filmmaker, and collector and archivist. this set released by Smithsonian Folkways in 1952 in 3 volumes (the 4th volume was planned but never released until the early 2000's) reintroduced to the world some of the brightest stars of early folk and country music recordings of the twenties and thirties and lending significant influence to the folk music revival of the fifties and sixties. We're even quite positive that the cd reissues in the nineties influenced the next wave of folk music in the early 2000's. The Carter Family, Blind Lemon Jefferson, Dock Boggs, Blind Willie Johnson, Furry Lewis, Charlie Poole, The Alabama Sacred Harp Singers, and many more lesser known musical figures are to be found in these collections, exploring the full range of regional American musical forms from Hawaiian guitar to Cajun music, blues, reels and gospel. Mississippi Records has gone to great lengths to reproduce the original albums all on 200 gram vinyl. Each volume is a double lp, housed in a cloth bound super thick cardboard gatefold sleeve with a tip on print on the front. In the gatefold there is a pouch with a reproduction of the original liner notes (at least in the first three volumes).
Volume Two is Social Music and focuses on music from both sacred and secular social gatherings. Dance songs, bluegrass fiddle tunes, gospel, and cajun songs, sacred harp singing and street preaching. This has some of our favorite folk songs ever including Delma Lachney's and Blind Uncle Gaspard melancholic cajun fiddle tune "La Danseuse" and Blind Willie Johnson's "John The Revelator". So great!
Sure they are pricey, but you won't see these around for long. Such an amazing mind-boggling collection and all so worth it!
B9 Bis was a label compilation from Sandwich Records, a Brussels' based post-punk and new wave imprint that mirrored itself after the Rough Trade model of running an underground label through an underground record shop. This compilation originally came out in 1980, showcasing what Belgium had to offer the world in the way of melding oblique electronics and moody theatrics to the post-punk ethos, which had already been established by the likes of Joy Division, Devo, and Magazine. Unfortunately, export sales for the label were never terribly strong and the label folded, despite the fact that the Belgian scene later exploded out of the electronic body music spurned on by Antler Subway throughout the decade.
What's found on the compilation is a solid cross section of the contemporary sound of 1980: slashing punk guitars, lumbering basslines, angular art-rock tunes, and tinkering with new-fangled synthesizers and sequencers. The influences of the aforementioned bands are worn proudly on the sleeves of many of these bands with admirable results. The standouts from the original comp include the pre-Front 242 project Prosthese with a cold burst of Klaus Schulze electronics, the jangle power pop of Digital Dance, and the bleak Joy Divisionisms of Satin Wall.
LTM have flushed out a full cds worth of material with a bunch of ancillary projects also from Belgium at that time including an early Front 242 track, an early b-side from the overlooked Siglo XX, and the Factory Records endorsed The Names. A very good investigation into a forgotten chapter of post-punk.
Like the freak circus entertainments of a bygone era, so too does this new B-Music compilation mine the fringe of far-flung female folk from the recent past and immediate present. Starting where the Folk Is A Four Letter Word comps left off, Bearded Ladies features many of the same B-music 'vixens' such as Wendy and Bonnie, Turid, Susan Christie, Selda, Heather Jones and Brigitte Fontaine joined by their more contemporary equivalents, Speck Mountain, Misty Dixon (Jane Weaver), Lights, Lispector, Emma Tricca, and Magpahi amongst others. Not as "Old Tymey" as the cover would suggest, Bearded Ladies excavates the rare individual artistry from pigeon-holed genre conventions as the contemporary artists are just as unfettered and original as the older artists, and not merely new retreads of folk motifs made popular in the last few years by Joanna Newsom and Cat Power. Another winner for B-Music. Ladyfolk lives!
You put two of the things we love most in the world, Soul Jazz compilations and Brazilian psych/pop from the 70's together, and you've got one very happy bunch of AQ staffers! Brazil 70 is the follow up to the great Tropicalia compilation Soul Jazz put out a couple years back which served as a great document and serious opened some eyes to the amazing musical movement and revolution in sound that went down in Brazil in the late 60's and early '70s. This compilation picks right up where that one left off, giving us a great glimpse into the post-tropicalia world of the '70s Brazilian music scene. There are some Tropicalia pioneers included here like Gilberto Gil, Caetano Veloso, Gal Costa, and Tom Ze. But what's most thrilling about Brazil 70 is all the amazing tracks from folks who haven't been as well documented here in the states. We've been blown away by the songs from Raul Seixas, Nelson Angelo & Joyce, Erasmo Carlos, Secos E Molhados, all of whom were making amazing and colorful sounds during the first half of the '70s in Brazil. Using the blueprints of the eclectic and spirited nature of Tropicalia, these artists tapped into some magical musical force, discovering new and incredible ways to create amazingly colorful psych-pop perfection. We can't stop listening to this...highly recommended!
By the looks of the first two compilations that Chapter Music has released documenting the Australian post-punk scene, we (and probably a lot of other folks) could use a series history lessons into the finer points of Antipodean punk. Having unearthed two incendiary Primitive Calculators collections from that same time period, Chapter again strikes gold with a stunning collection of terminally obscure bands who were much more talented and intriguing than their lack of recognition might reflect. The only two bands that have even come across our radar are Severed Heads (but here with an incredibly primitive electronic sound and a female singer) and Microfilm (the amazing, Wire-esque dour post punk band fronted by Lisa Gerrand who later went on to form Dead Can Dance); but for everybody else, it's anybody's guess as to whatever became of them. Nonetheless, this comp confirms that the Australian take on post-punk agitation, no-wave convolutions and contortions, and new wave bleakness was as vibrant as what more well know scenes (i.e. New York, Berlin, London) had managed. As on the first comp (which featured a band called the Slugfuckers), volume 2 also sports a band with an incredible name: The Goat That Went "Om." Highly recommended
Every once in a while something comes along that we KNOW we're gonna love, just from reading about it ahead of time. Here's a very good example, and now that we have heard it, we certainly DO love it. Heck, it pretty much had us with its subtitle - and also 'cause of the label it's on. From Jonny Trunk's ever reliable, nostalgic UK imprint specializing in all kinds of unusual vintage finds, comes this compilation of children's music - no, not music FOR children, but music BY children, made in British primary and secondary schools, as part of, well, classroom projects, between 1959 and 1981. All sourced from rare, mostly privately pressed vinyl (released by the schools themselves, for educational purposes or to commemorate an event), collected over the years by Trunk. The selections presented here encompass many, many sorts of the strange and the wonderful, brimming with youthful innocence and enthusiasm. There's lovely renditions of traditional folk songs, there's quaint classical pieces and instrumental improvisations, there's experimental stuff influenced by 20th century avant-garde composers like Stockhausen (via an enlightened teacher), there's an oddly amusing choral song about drunk driving, there's a cover of Art Garfunkel's "Bright Eyes" from the Watership Down soundtrack�
Of the 25 tracks (19 on the vinyl), some of the standouts for sure are the creative efforts of a group/project called Sounds Of Silence, who contribute the track "Musique Concrete" among others, including the creepy "The Lyke-Wake Dirge". Also many of the folk/vocal numbers are quite gentle and quiet and lovely. Lots of charming tracks to treasure here, in other words. We imagine that Trunk had to sift through a lot of lesser material to find these gems.
For sure for fans of the classic Langley Schools Music Project, as well those who liked a couple previous Trunk releases, namely Carl Orff & Gunild Keetman's Music For Children, and the album by Cults Percussion Ensemble.
Naturally, the cd booklet and lp sleeve includes Trunk's informative liner notes and cover graphics from the original lps.
A fantastic compilation of amazing French cosmic prog-tronic jams that is blowing our minds! An incredible survey of experimentation and rhythm that shows us that while the French may not have invented prog or disco, they certainly had the most fun taking those genres to their outer limits in exciting combination. Practically everyone is represented, including cinematic gems by Jean-Michel Jarre, Alain Goraguer (La Planet Sauvage composer!), Patrick Juvet and Serge Gainsbourg; Moog workouts by Jean-Jaques Perrey, Quartz and Pierre Bachelet; and cosmic disco reveries by Bernard Fevre, Space, Droids, Space Art and Cerrone. But there are also plenty of rarities from groups we know less about: Atomic Crocus, Rene Roussel, and Universal Energy amongst many others. Dig the Mobius-style cover art too. So Killer!
Leave it to the fine folks at the Soul Jazz Label to bring us a stellar Krautrock compilation that is as heavy on obscurities as it is on classics. Don't let the fact that the Neu!, Faust and Amon Duul tracks will probably be familiar to the most casual krautrock listener, or that pretty much all the classic bands in the canon (save for Kraftwerk and Klaus Schulze) are represented, deter you from this well-researched and beautifully sequenced compilation. Why? Well, because this compilation does a great job of showcasing the many diverse facets of the music that defined krautrock: Kosmishe electronica, hippie commune folk, motorik rhythms, proggy jazz-funk and lysergic cinematographic soundscapes. There are plenty of rarities from bands we've barely heard of such as Between, E.M.A.K., Michael Bundt, and Ibliss, as well as bands and artists we love like Kollectiv (aka Kollektiv), Conrad Schnitzler, Deuter and Gila that perhaps casual fans may not know much about. Plus many of the more well known groups are represented by less well known tracks or later periods. The Can tracks, for example. "Aspectacle" and "I Want More" are from later records, while the great Tangerine Dream track "No Man's Land" is from an early eighties record, a less seminal period for most classic Krautrock, but one filled with plenty of amazing discoveries for those brave enough to wade through some crud. Thankfully Soul Jazz did that work for us! Here is the full listing of bands: Can (2 tracks), Between, Harmonia (2 tracks) Gila, Kollectiv, Michael Bundt, E.M.A.K., Popol Vuh (2 tracks), Conrad Schnitzler, La Dusseldorf, Faust, Neu!, Cluster, Ibliss, Moebius, Roedelius, Amon Duul II (2 tracks) Ash Ra Tempel, Tangerine Dream, and Deuter.
Comes with a full color booklet showcasing the history of the bands and music. Perfect for both newbies and longtime fans! Awesome!
We've been waiting for this one with all kinds of excitement and anticipation. The always eclectic and forward minded folks at Tigersushi have compiled one of the more intriguing and rewarding comps of recent times. Digging deep into the vaults of the slow and drugged out side of disco's past they have miraculously connected dots that we always dreamed would finally be joined together. Dirty Space Disco brings together folks from the more avant and krautrock worlds like Roedelius (of Cluster), Conrad Schnitzler, and Clara Mondshine, setting their tracks up alongside disco luminaries and obscure dance floor burners from Sylvester, Fern Kinney, Odyssey, Undisputed Truth and more. This is all about the moody, seductive and way late night side of disco.
We've been big fans of the current movement of artists tapping into this seductive sound (Lindstrom, Chromatics, Prins Thomas, etc.) but we're so happy to have the blueprints and origins of those sounds all on one disc. Though he's not included in this collection we know Arthur Russell would be so happy to see this disco / avant-garde match up finally happen. We're in love with so much of this comp but it's pretty much worth it alone for Sylvester's "I Need Somebody To Love Tonight" one of the greatest spaced out disco gems of all time, from his amazing Stars LP which came out in 1979 and features the innovative production of Patrick Cowley, one of the unsung heroes and pioneers of the San Francisco electronic/dance scene.
Luckily just about every other track is just as fantastic. This collection has been at the top of the charts on KUSF (our local college radio station, where both Irwin and Andee have shows) ever since it went into rotation and it's no surprise because it's the kind of collection that easily wins over folks who thought they just weren't into disco just as much as it pleases those of us who are huge disco freaks!! Highly recommended!
The Sublime Frequencies label is really on a roll lately, as always it seems, a flurry of new releases, all of them fantastic, including a recent Record Of The Week (Omar Souleyman), not one but two releases on this week's list (this, and one of our current Records Of The Week, Dara Puspita!), and new stuff upcoming soon as well. And as always, every time we get a new SF release, we can't help but think 'best one yet!', every single one is a thrilling earful of some remarkable sounds. This one is of particular note, as it's related to a past Sublime Frequencies release, the Musical Brotherhoods From The Trans-Saharan Highway dvd, which after watching repeatedly, we couldn't help but hope for a soundtrack, and well, this is about as close as we're gonna get. A handful of these tracks were in fact featured in that film, and in addition to those tracks, there are twice as many more, to let us experience the magic and mystery of the Jemaa El Fna, aka Rendezvous Of The Dead, aka a central square in the Marrakesh, Morocco, which during the day is a place for locals and tourists alike to gather, food and music and magicians and entertainers and story tellers, but at night, when the tourists are tucked away safely in bed, these musicians create some of the most intense and passionate music we've heard. Explosive and expressive and distorted and super blown out. Amps powered by car batteries, broadcast through beat up old megaphone speakers, hand built instruments, wild percussion, soulful ecstatic vocals, it's probably worth revisiting our review of the dvd, as the setting is as much a part of the music as the sounds:
"Ancient mystical brotherhoods', small groups of stringed instruments and drums, players managing to create intense and intensely emotional sounds and songs, that range from dark and simple, sweetly contemplative, to fierce and fiery and jubilant, explosive and over the top._Performing in bustling street markets, lit by fires and lamplight, a huge after dark celebration, story telling, eating, socializing but most importantly making music... Small lantern lit clusters of people gather around old record players, home made amplifiers, rusty old speakers, strange (to our eyes) stringed instruments, all manner of drums and percussion, the crowd eager to bask in this amazing music, and just as often to participate, whether it be as another drummer, a singer, a dancer or even just as an onlooker. The music, is a stripped down blues, the buzzing strings, the gorgeous hypnotic melodies, looped and cyclical, so hypnotic and catchy, the vocals soulful and impassioned, from solo crooning to strange harmonies, to chanting, and lots of festive sing alongs. The focus is the buzzing strings and the pounding drums, and there are plenty of both, but there are also buzzing snake charmer style horns, and of course the usual outdoor crowd sounds, folks talking and laughing, cars driving past. It's so much like wandering through Morocco, it's amazing. The rhythms and the melodies, a constant barrage of groove and drone, simple percussive thumps and shuffles, haunting melodies, huge tribal drum jams and of course some incredible riffing. Our favorite jams feature what appears to be a traditional banjo, but electrified and plugged into a rusty old handmade amplifier, turning the banjo into an awesome buzzing sitar like beast, emitting intense almost metallic chunks of incendiary riffing, raw and emotional, super distorted and intense, underpinning the wailing vocals and dense drumming.
And that pretty much is a perfect description of this whole record, a jubilant, celebratory, wild and exultant musical get together, the sound is fierce and vibrant and raw and in-the-red, super distorted and LOUD, like you were really there, the stringed instruments buzz and howl, the drums pound and thump and utterly mesmerize, the singers croon and wail, usually with the crowd joining in, the sound is just so intense and alive, really incredible. The pure joy of music making is rarely so palpable. Which makes this, yeah, we're gonna say it again, maybe one of our favorite Sublime Frequencies yet!
Comes in a thick full color gatefold, includes extensive liner notes. And like all the Sublime Frequencies vinyl, these are super limited, we order as many as we can, but once they're gone, we're not able to get more. You know what that means...
