A long-awaited reissue of Robbie Basho's debut, originally released on John Fahey's Takoma label in 1965. Basho was the third part of the Takoma triad which of course included Fahey and Leo Kottke. A big surprise that back then, Basho was the least popular of the three, as he has become a serious cult favorite of the genre since, and this first look into his unique take on Guitar Soli shows why.
Basho was the least interested in American forms of blues, classical and ragtime, and sought out instead Celtic and Oriental idioms which heavily influenced his music, giving his work a searching devotional quality. But he also wasn't afraid of performing with a brusque playing style as long as it captured an unfettered emotional intensity. This set definitely highlights his inventiveness as he uses the guitar body for a resonating percussive instrument and even accompanies himself on the flute on one song.
Housed in a Smithsonian Folkways style tip-on sleeve, with a simple hermetic drawing, Seal of The Blue Lotus has the feel of an arcane mystical object, one that imparts ancient wisdom to seekers of the craft. Basho's records didn't have cryptic liner notes or partake in humorous antiquated eccentricities, so their more serious reverential nature may have had something to do with his lower profile on the Takoma roster, but probably everything to do with why his records are so coveted now.
This two-part solo guitar masterwork recorded for the Takoma label in 1967 finally gets a limited vinyl reissue - and these will be gone fast, so act accordingly! Altogether, these nine pieces and suites are some of the most intricate hybrids of guitar form invention: Celtic, blues, ragas, classical, flamenco and medieval. Lyrical and melancholic, cascading 6 and 12 string filigrees weave into long-form meditations of minor key form and modal beauty. Basho was at the peak of his powers when these were recorded nearly 50 years ago, and their plaintive majesty has not diminished in the least. Did we say limited?? Essential for your Takoma collections or anyone enthralled by John Fahey and early James Blackshaw.
This two-part solo guitar masterwork recorded for the Takoma label in 1967 finally gets a limited vinyl reissue - and these will be gone fast, so act accordingly! Altogether, these nine pieces and suites are some of the most intricate hybrids of guitar form invention: Celtic, blues, ragas, classical, flamenco and medieval. Lyrical and melancholic, cascading 6 and 12 string filigrees weave into long-form meditations of minor key form and modal beauty. Basho was at the peak of his powers when these were recorded nearly 50 years ago, and their plaintive majesty has not diminished in the least. Did we say limited?? Essential for your Takoma collections or anyone enthralled by John Fahey and early James Blackshaw.
You know we must confess it is getting harder and harder to write about instrumental acoustic guitar records and not repeat ourselves. Sure we can talk about the various fingerpicking styles, the different tunings, the long-enduring influence and lasting legacy of John Fahey, but it starts to sound routine and in a wide field of players concentrating solely on one instrument, it's not easy to keep a fresh perspective. So thank the stars that the Tompkins Square label has reissued this amazing 1970 recording from Robbie Basho because it sounds so refreshing. Basho was the least known of the Takoma label trio, John Fahey and Leo Kottke being the brighter stars. But Basho's style heavily influenced by raga modalities and Celtic melodic structures was more akin to the classical and Eastern hybrid styles of Sandy Bull and Pete Walker. Venus in Cancer is a transitional recording originally released on ABC's Blue Thumb imprint just after he left the Takoma label and before his later New Age dabbling on Windham Hill. The songs are long and flowing, spiritually imbibed (but not overtly so) with melancholic melodic structures and raga-ish tempos that occasionally burst out in song. Yes, folks, Robbie Basho sings on this one (a point other reviews we read seem to ignore). But, before you all run away into the hills, let us tell you that his voice is a) pretty great in context with what he's playing and b) it's thankfully sparse throughout the record. On one song, he does some Henry Flynt-style field hollering, on another a bit of spoken verse, and yet on another his voice recalls a slowed down Antony or John Jacob Niles. This has got to be one of the best and unusual examples of primitive guitar we have heard in a while and as you well know we have heard a lot. Plus the cover art is pretty damn rad. Highly Recommended!
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
SORRY.
Teetering between a touching personal vision about the gravest of existential themes and sentimental pathos, William Basinksi has overloaded the context of "Disintegration Loops" with plenty of cultural references dealing in grandiose melancholia, including 9/11, the World Trade Center, the death of English poet Thomas Chatterton, the prosaic dreaminess of early 20th century American composers, the death of antiquated technologies, etc. This overload of metaphoric sadness and loss which is clearly stated well before a single note of music emanates from the CD doesn't leave much room for personal interpretation. Simply put you must feel sad when listening to this album.
To be fair, the effect of witnessing the collapse of the World Trade Center has been traumatic to us all, and observing that horrific spectacle from the roof of his Brooklyn apartment undoubtably scarred Basinksi. For better or for worse, Basinski used "Disintegration Loops" as his personal soundtrack for the WTC collapse, playing this composition throughout the night as the fires burned and ash spewed into the air. The piece itself intrinsically deals with decay, as it came about because Basinski had discovered an old tape loop, a rendering of a subtle arpeggiated countermelody from lush orchestral deep horns and strings, that he made some two decades ago and decided to archive the piece digitally -- during that process, Basinki found that the oxide of the tape loop was gradually flaking off, leaving unreadable gaps on the loop itself. Hence, "Disintegration Loops". Over this 63 minute recycling of sound, the orchestration is eventually all but lost amidst the terse pops and a ubiquitous wash of reverb.
Oh yes, this album is gorgeous; but I can't shake the feeling that I've been manipulated Steven Spielberg-style into granting an emotional weight to a piece of art more through a tautological argument rather than through aesthetic merit.
One of our absolute favorite minimalist composers pulls another lovely work from his bag of tricks. That bag of tricks being his seemingly endless collection of moldering tape loops initially recorded a couple of decades ago. This time around it's from a deceptively simple piano loop titled "Variation #9: Pantelleria". Pantelleria is a tiny volcanic island southwest of Sicily in the Mediterranean Sea whose long and ancient history is steeped in bloodshed, due to its once strategic proximity to warring Christian and Muslim nations. The patina of time on Basinski's key material, coupled with a happy accident of the tape loop slipping off of the tape head, creates a beautifully decaying and lyrically submerged counterpoint effect. What at first seems like five simple notes repeated ends up sounding like Nature cleansing herself of mankind's bloody history. Gorgeous!
The newly released, highly anticipated Smile Sessions are finally here and it's been an occasion for all sorts of debate and nerd-ery among us. First off, some of us have been obsessed with the record for years, having acquired various bootlegs, the recent Brian Wilson re-do, as well as tracing the seeds of the Smile sessions throughout the trajectory of the later Beach Boys records (which are some of our favorites). While our bootleg versions always had the main song cycle separated from the various shorter interludes and segues that connected them, the Brian Wilson re-do saw the potential of what could have been, yet it still felt like a cover version of what was supposed to be the real thing.
Now what the Smile Sessions tries to do, and for the most part succeeds in doing, is taking the blueprint Wilson made with the re-do and marrying the songs and interludes into a solid dazzling whole. The flow of what is understood as the proper album has never sounded better with the rich harmonic vocals, symphonic arrangements and beautifully antiquarian lyricism provided by Van Dyke Parks combined in elaborately layered arrays of epiphanal pop orchestration. It also adds a disc and a half of bonus material, session segments, and stereo mixes of various tracks and interludes left off the main album, which is where the debate among us begins. Scott appreciates the bonus material but really wishes (and this goes for most reissues with bonus material) that they isolated the whole of the album to one disc, so that you really get a sense of the proper album's completion. Starting multiple alternate versions of "Heroes and Villains" (whose lyrical motif is repeated in various forms throughout the record) shortly after "Good Vibrations" ends, mimics the sensation we imagine Brian Wilson probably felt in realizing he couldn't finish the project because it kept endlessly replaying in his head. Andee thinks that the bonus material is the real gold here and just wants to get the elaborate 5 cd/2lp/2x7" version just to geek out on endless takes of "Good Vibrations" and all the rehearsals and studio chatter (and he also thinks that Scott should just learn how to use the stop button on his cd player.). Allan doesn't understand the "lost record" appeal of it all. "What was wrong with Smiley Smile?" Oh, Allan.
We're sure plenty of folks will be having their own geeky debates. For instance, why isn't "Cool, Cool Water" included in the main song cycle like it was in the bootlegs, and in Brian Wilson's version (renamed and rewritten as "Blue Hawaii")? Instead it's relegated to the bonus material. But really that's all music geek piffle to be argued and discussed in some other forum. For the most part, the main album is put together quite faithfully to Wilson's vision and it sounds amazing!. We're used to the sometimes slightly abrupt transitions that have long become a part of the record's charm and the result is still quite incredible and kaleidoscopic. No matter our particular desires of how we would try to put this together, it's still quite a remarkable feat. We still wonder if Wilson finished and released this as it was meant to be in 1967, would we still care so much about it? That's for another debate. Still for those obsessed as we are or even for the newly curious this comes Highly Recommended!!!!!
The two cd version comes housed in a box with a 36 page booklet, liner notes by Brian Wilson, a 15" x 20" poster and a button!
While the 5cd+2lp+2x7" box comes housed in a 3D version of Frank Holmes illustrated storefront cover. 4 and a half discs of bonus material including a disc each of the "Heroes and Villains" and "Good Vibrations sessions alone. The 2lps have the album proper as well as a side of extra bonus material and two 7"s with the 2 parts of "Heroes and Villains" on one and "Vege-Tables" / "Surf's Up" on the other. Plus a 60 page case bound book, liner notes by Brian Wilson, Mike Love, Al Jardine and Bruce Johnston and a 24" x 36" poster. Wow!!!
Sometimes the stars just align so perfectly. The first time we got to hear Beach Fossils it was a breezy and sunny afternoon. The front door was wide open, the wind gently blowing through the trees outside, and the songs we were hearing couldn't have provided a more perfect soundtrack. Beach Fossils is a one man band, and there definitely seem to be legions of those these days. But damn, if folks can keep creating songs as good as these alone in their bedrooms, then we say who needs a full band! Beach Fossils stands out from so much of the recent lo-fi indie garage pop, being not so much about feedback and distortion and low fidelity. Instead, it's the amazing songs on the record that grab your attention. Lazy day, dazed & glazed pop gems that remind us of a wonderful sound situated perfectly betwixt Kurt Vile and Pavement.
There is something so authentic and fresh sounding in Beach Fossils' music. It compels us to let go and immediately give in to the soft breezes that seem to accompany the soaring washed out melodies on display here. Major contender for pop record of the year perhaps, and without a doubt another PERFECT summer album!
Swoon....sigh....melt! That's all we want to do when we listen to the newest album by this Baltimore duo who we've been in love with since their debut ep from way back when. The follow up to their great full length Devotion, this is a record we and so many others have been highly anticipating and it's so nice to start the new year with an album that is already ruling our stereos and will no doubt end up on many of our year end favorite lists.
Teen Dream is quite simply, exquisite and elegant. The golden warmth and soft waves of comfort and longing BH are able to express through their songs makes them truly one of the most special bands around. There is a timelessness and sense of authenticity that rings so true within their songs. This is the music you put on when you've had your heart broken or you just discovered new love or when you are laying in bed with that special someone and its time to just bliss out, lost in a daze without saying a word. Teen Dream is the soundtrack for thinking of a close friend who is in a far away place, it's a sonic refuge, when you need somewhere safe to drift and daydream all of your troubles away.
We have a feeling that this record is about to get an avalanche of press and attention but it couldn't be more deserved. This is hands down one of the most majestic and moving records to come out in a very long time. Nothing feels forced, no songs are throwaways, start to finish Teen Dream sounds practically perfect, a classic that will no doubt remain a classic regardless of shifting sounds and tastes.
As an added bonus Teen Dream also comes with a dvd, containing a video for every single song on the album created by different directors. We haven't even gotten around to watching it yet cuz for now all we want to do is listen to the album over and over again, letting ourselves get lost in the glistening images it evokes in our own subconscious. Breathtaking!
In case you haven't heard the ruckus, the Beatles albums have all been remastered and reissued with fancy new digipak packaging, new liner notes, rare photos, and more! We've got 'em, and we're loving them!
You might've read our recent glowing review of For Sale, well, Magical Mystery Tour is another particular fave around these parts. A wild mix of groundbreaking bizarre psychedelia and sumptuous heart-melting pop including "I Am The Walrus", "Blue Jay Way", "Hello Goodbye", "Penny Lane", and "All You Need Is Love" (the birthplace of math-rock... okay, maybe not really, but Lennon sure sings his way around a bunch of different meters)... yes!
Oh, and if you're feeling extra splurge-y, there's also the Beatles Mono Box set which is in a league all its own (and which was at the tip-top of Cup's 2009 favorites list). The limited edition 13-disc box set contains all of their albums up to and including the White Album plus a collection of singles and eps - all in mono as they were originally produced! Unlike their stereo counterparts, the mono remasters haven't been given the modern rock treatment (i.e, everything loud). Hence, they have a stunning dynamic range, and sound a-m-a-z-i-n-g! Apart from the stereo versus mono distinctions, the recordings definitely sound different, and in many cases are actually different, as the stereo versions were often mixed at a much later date. Each of the cds is packaged in a beautiful mini replica lp jacket complete with mini replica inner sleeve to boot. Unfortunately the mono albums are not currently available individually, so this is the only way to get 'em... and only for a limited time. If you want one, we'd be happy to order one in for you!
We've carried this longtime aQ fave several times over the years, in multiple formats, in varying degrees of availability, unfortunately, it never seemed to stick around for long. For a while we were even in contact with Beausoleil himself via his wife who was handling his business for a while, trying to get copies. Well, now you can thank the fine folks at Ajna, who have not only reissued it again, but added TONS of unreleased material, included all sorts of new, original artwork, pressed it up on VINYL and packed it all in a super deluxe box. These are expensive, but so worth it, after all, it's the only way to currently get Lucifer Rising, and of course it's a limited pressing, so these won't be around forever...
Ahhh Lucifer Rising, the rare soundtrack to cult underground director and Crowley-ite Kenneth Anger's film Lucifer Rising (begun in the mid-'60s, completed in 1980). Originally Jimmy Page was supposed to do the score, but he bowed out and the music was instead handled by another cult figure, the musical visionary and imprisoned killer Bobby Beausoleil, who composed and performed this spacey psychedelic opus with his Freedom Orchestra (presumably all fellow prisoners with Bobby).
Bobby and the Freedom Orchestra play electric guitars, Fender Rhodes electric pianos, some synths and bass...there's two drummers, and a trumpet player. The result is a sometimes sinister, sometimes blissful, always beautiful and "cosmic" drifting soundscape. Gurgling old-school electronics blend with propulsive rock drumming, while psychedelic guitar soloing tears across the sunset horizon created by the synths...The combination results in what you might imagine an early '70s Tangerine Dream/Ennio Morricone collaboration might have sounded like. It's indeed a lost classic. And the composer's life story is at least as weird and interesting as the music...
In the late Sixties, Bobby was a rising star in the LA rock-pop scene, hanging with Zappa, the Beach Boys, and Love. But then a drug deal went bad and he was sent to death row for murder, arrested 3 days before the Manson killing spree. Fortunately for him, his sentence was eventually commuted, but he's spent like the last 30 years in jail. He's been a model prisoner, pursuing his talents in music and art despite his incarceration, and you'd think that the parole board would have let him out by now (he's been paying his debt to society longer than anybody else has for a similar crime, we're told) but sadly for Bobby, he's got to deal with his association with the notorious Charles Manson. While never a member of Manson's Family (a common misconception), he did play in a band with Manson, and the media hype surrounding anything to do with Manson hasn't helped Bobby's case, as you might imagine! (At least that's the way Beausoleil tells it. But the more one delves into the story of "Lucifer Rising", the weirder things get -- for instance, apparently Bobby was supposed to PLAY the role of Lucifer in the original 1966 version of Anger's film, but the two had a falling out and Bobby allegedly stole the footage and buried it in Death Valley! How this jibes with him later writing this soundtrack, we don't know.)
Yet, not being one to simply sit in his cell and rot, Bobby has, as we said, kept quite busy within the clutches of the California Penal system.
This new vinyl box set, includes all the music on the various versions we've carried over the years, plus SO MUCH MORE.
This version includes newly remastered recordings spanning 11 years, from the original 1967 recordings to the Tracy Prison recordings in 1978. 4 lps, 2 of which are entirely unreleased material, nine new pieces of art by Beausoleil, 8 on the printed inner sleeves, and one 2 foot by 3 foot poster, a second poster, a massive booklet, with tons of new liner notes, and loads of photos, the box gorgeous and hefty, full color outside and inside, this is THE outsider lost seventies occult rock soundtrack holy grail for sure.
And although for obvious reasons Bobby wouldn't probably approve of the use of the word to describe himself and this soundtrack, in the aQuarius recOrds' musical context it's quite appropriate: CULT!
When we first heard a track from this album a few months ago, our immediate reaction was A) wow, we really had better find a way to get it for the store and B) if and when we do, it'll probably have to be a Record Of The Week. And that was just from hearing ONE song. Fortunately, we did manage to get some of these imports, and the rest of the record only confirmed and amplified our first impression. Record Of The Week it is! (Actually, some of us here, like Andee, were already Bebey fans from way back, but for others of us, gosh, what an introduction...)
As you know, we've certainly seen a bunch of great groovy African reissues lately (in fact, there's a couple others elsewhere on this week's list). But this collection of the late Cameroonian composer & writer Francis Bebey's music is rather unique, to say the least. And it's got something in common with another cool item we're reviewing this week, the vintage "electronic soul" compilation Personal Space. As the title indicates, the focus here is on the especially electronic side of his discography, from the era when multi-instrumentalist Bebey experimented with the latest gear - tape recorders, keyboards, drum machines - to record his own music at home in Paris, making for delightfully dancey, avant-garde Afropop.
The track we had heard was the first one here, "New Track", an over 8 minute long number that starts off with tinkling thumb piano before blaring synth stabs, burbling keys, and ticking drum machine rhythms kick in... pretty soon, the song has become dense with loops and layers, repeating vocals about bananas and potatoes and politics creating a kind of cheerfully confusing mantra. It's as fresh and charming and mesmeric and groovy today as it was when Bebey recorded it in back in '82.
Though this would pretty much be worth it just for that memorable song alone, the rest of this 14-track collection is full of further futuristic Afrofunk highlights. Meaning, more blurting synthesized horns, head bopping basslines, thumping electronic beats augmented by hand percussion, and laidback vocals - some spoken, some sung, in various languages (Duala, French and English). Bebey's talent on classical guitar is also evident. It's quite an amazing mix altogether; 'makossa' music from Cameroon meets "Blow Your Head" style Moog outbursts (as on the woozy instrumental track "Super Jingle", with its skronky synth shiver set amidst hypnotic percussive pulsations). Sometimes the mood gets emotive in other ways, Bebey bringing the beats down and singing sadly in a soft, ragged voice... Here we will go out on a limb, and make a wild hypothetical rock crit "cross between this and that" equation, of Konono No.1 + Arthur Russell, whattya think?
Basically, this is as cool as anything you could imagine something called "African Electronic Music 1975-1982" might possibly sound like! And maybe even cooler than that.
Packaged with liner notes in both English and French.
We made the last Francis Bebey compilation from the Born Bad label, African Electronic Music 1975-1982 our Record of The Week back in 2012 (was it really 62 lists ago? Geez!). Yet, as much as love this Cameroonian musician and composer, if this new compilation was somehow more of the same, we wonder if we would bestow it the same honor. Hmmm... Guess the point we're trying to make is that this new compilation, Psychedelic Sanza 1982-1984 is an altogether different but equally amazing collection, the sound well removed from the electronic afro-pop of its predecessor. Why is that? Well. it helps to know that the sanza is an African thumb piano, also known as the mbira or kalimba, among many other names, depending upon region and design, and this compilation focuses specifically on the hypnotic ethereal music Bebey made with this instrument. Seriously, ever since the first compilation was released we've been hoping one would come out documenting this subsequent period as these are some of our very favorite recordings by Bebey. Music that is so incredibly groovy, but distinctly otherworldly, moving and hauntingly transportive that we HAD to make this one Record of the Week as well!
Compiled from recordings released on the Ozileka and Original Music labels from 1982-1984, Bebey's sanza recordings are less pop structured and more tribal and rhythmic, enhanced by loping funk-driven basslines and propulsive percussion. Yet despite their funkiness, they mark a more serious side of musical study away from the humorous pop songs Bebey became famous for and into a more tonal world of ethnological polyphony. The tonal range of the sanza doesn't adhere neatly to Western tuning standards either, adding a kind of mystical quality to the overall song structure, like a primitive version of minimalist composition. There's a dreamier element as well, as the fuzzy metallic bell tones of the sanza coalesce into mesmerizing whorls of sound with Bebey's voice floating above, sometimes in keening wordless bird calls of sound or deeply sustained ragged warbles. In others, Bebey sings alternately in French, English and Duala, sometimes spoken English like in "Forest Nativity" about a jungle child born to conquer wickedness, or in beautiful heartfelt laments like the french-sung "Sanza Tristesse".
The only liner notes provided are a remembrance by Bebey's son Patrick who recalls his initial misgivings with the instrument because he was trained on piano and the sanza never sounded right. Yet eventually his father won him over by gently prodding him to play and see what he could do with it. He writes, "Playing the sansa, you enter a world that enraptures you in a very serene and mesmerizing way. I think its sounds evoke a rainbow, with rain falling while the sun shines. A very peaceful feeling. It allows you to make music that truly sounds like life." Indeed!
Both the cd and vinyl beautifully packaged with incredible cover art, the lp pressed on nice thick vinyl, though unfortunately there's no download code.
Believer is the new musical project of Danny Paul Grody and Trevor Montgomery (both from Tarentel and The Drift as well as various other side projects and solo outfits including Lazarus, and Moholy-Nagy). For their debut release put out by Land And Sea, who brought us the Coconut 7" from a couple of lists ago, the duo recorded three expansive synth-based compositions that are beautifully minimal and impressionistic. Using loops, sweeping bell tones and guitar washes, the three tracks encompass a kind of melodic formlessness, beginning with a pattern and then slowly letting it dissolve into something much airier, all the while still maintaining a sense of gravity and musical purpose. A fine debut that makes us look forward to whatever comes next. Super limited to 50 copies in handsewn paper covers (that you have to rip or cut open to get to the disc!). Highly Recommended!
One of the more understated figures in Tropicalia gets one of his best but equally understated albums reissued. Forca Bruta, from 1970, didn't yield any of the hits he was known for such as "Chove Chuva", "Mas Que Nada" or "Umbabarauma", but it's still one of his best collections of songs. Backed by Trio Mocoto, who accompanied Ben through many of his biggest hits, Forca Bruta is a more mellow groover of samba soul that despite its simpler acoustic arrangements packs a powerful punch with some seriously amazing musicianship. Ben wasn't as radical a political figure as his compatriots Gilberto Gil or Caetano Veloso, but was instrumental in importing West African rhythm influences into his music which was influential in both Veloso's and Gil's musical development. Awesome reissue, highly recommended!
Having released a superhuman amount of singles and split 12"s for Tempa , Big Apple, Planet Mu, and Hot Flush labels, Benga is most definitely one of the key figures bringing dubstep to a wider audience. That's mainly due to the UK club success of "Night", Benga's collaboration with Coki, his Tempa labelmate. The quivering nervous build-up to a massively skittery and surfy air-raid siren release cemented the producer's reputation as one to watch. Now with this full length, Benga is given room to expand the boundaries of what dubstep can be. Utilizing plaintive jazz horns, synth squelches, moody electro, warmer textures and beats that veer more towards house than genremates Burial or Kode 9, Diary of An Afro Warrior is more than a series of strung together singles but a richly complex and diverse dancefloor manifesto that is amongst the best the genre has to offer. Highly Recommended!
There are unfortunately, some non-musical factors that contribute to what records we choose to be our Record Of The Week. Cost is one. There have been plenty of $30, or $40, or even $50 records that we've chosen to not make ROTW just because a record like that is often well outside a lot of folks' range of affordability. Once in a while we do make an exception, but that's usually when a record is SO good we just can't say no. Another factor is availability. No matter how great a record is, if we can only ever get 5 or 10 or 20 copies, often not knowing how long it will take to get more, or if we'll be able to get more at all, then we usually choose to highlight it, or if the numbers are super small, not list it at all (which is another reason visiting aQ in person is always a good idea, there's plenty of stuff that doesn't make it onto the list!). Anyway, the point of all this, is that we have been LOVING this Benge record, and until now we've only been able to get it in dribs and drabs, 5 copies here, 2 copies there, but we finally managed to get a bunch. A bunch in this case being about 15 copies. So fair warning, this disc is AWESOME, everyone is gonna want one, so when we sell out, please be patient, we're already doing our best to get more in, it just might take a while. So quick on the trigger, or be ready to wait patiently.
And what kind of record deserves all of these disclaimers? What kind of record can we be so sure all aQ list readers will want? How about a miniature hardcover book, containing a cd with 20 tracks, each track performed on a different synthesizer, from a different year, spanning the years 1968 to 1998, a sonic roadmap of the evolution of the synthesizer, from the first commercially available synths in the late sixties, to the introduction of fully digital synthesizers in the late eighties. Each page of the book featuring a full color photo of the synthesizer used to create that track, along with a schematic of that synth, as well as liner notes all about the synthesizer, as well as how the track was created. That all still might not be enough if the music wasn't amazing, but it is. Somehow strangely cohesive, even though 20 different instruments were used, the sounds here are uniformly blissed out and dreamy, a sort of new age droney drifty washed out shimmer, peppered with beautiful melodies and occasional percussion. Did you love the recent Bogner record of the week? Do you love Tangerine Dream? Popol Vuh? That Edmond De Dyster reissue? Deuter? The William Eaton reissue on EM? Steve Hillage's Rainbow Dome Music? Any number of avant electronic dronemusic cd-r's? Then you'll love this. Or if you're just a music geek that loves these sorts of 'objects', or tech-heads who love vintage gear. Hard to really imagine anyone not digging this big time.
So beyond the book, and the photos and the liner notes and the cool packaging, the music within is truly divine, and fairly diverse, from long slow oceans of sound, swirling and shimmering and sun dappled, to space aged glitch and skitter, hum and buzz, primitive robot disco bleep and bloop, to haunting Goblin-y synthscapery, to fluttery ethereal electronica rife with crystalline melodies and simple rhythms, to super creepy and dark cinematic ambience, to playful electronic shuffles, to blown out expansive cosmic shimmerscapes and on and on.
This could very well have been a super boring demonstration style record, and granted, most of us probably would have bought it anyway for the book and the pix and the strange sounds, being the huge music geeks we are, but thankfully, even with all the extras stripped away, we'd still be left with a gorgeous, playful, pretty, blissed out, warm and shimmery, slightly ominous, dramatic and epic, bleepy and bloopy experimental space age new age ambient electronic record. Which is even better.
Needless to say, WAY recommended. Amazing packaging, a miniature hardcover book, with tons of photos and liner notes and schematics, as well as an introduction by Robin Rimbaud aka Scanner. And again, these have been tough to keep in stock, so if we run out, please be patient while we wait for more to arrive.
Any record bearing the legend: "All the music on this cd has been created using a very old record player, second hand microphones, discarded tape recorders and various bits of wire" pretty much has to be good. Well okay, maybe HAS TO is exaggerating, but at the very least that sort of description is enough to get us very intrigued.
And in this case, it is good, but at the same time nothing at all like we were expecting.
We had imagined some sort of washed out Philip Jeck style drones, or pixelated Tim Hecker-ish soundscapes, or even the sort of crackling slow decay of William Basinski's tape pieces, but instead, Grant Beran has taken old records and some junky beat up equipment and used them to create surprisingly rhythmic tracks, utilizing various cracks and pops, and skips to fashion almost-grooves, like a lo-fi DJ Shadow sort of. The opener is all fuzzy and buzzy, but with a super driving beat, a skipping record looped into a hypnotic groove, a little bit techno, a little bit hip hop, a little creepy Goblin soundtrack, and a lot fuzzed out turntable buzz. It's not hard to imagine some clever DJ adding huge beats to this and you'd have the most fucked up lo-fi dancefloor jam ever. But we don't want to exaggerate the 'dance' aspect, it's more like the soundtrack to some lost John Carpenter movie, dubbed from VHS to VHS to home stereo to microcassette recorder until it ended up sounding like this, groove and fuzzy and murky and awesome!
The second track is much more moody and atmospheric, the rhythms an afterthought, that seem to surface randomly, while the meat of the track is deep sonorous tones, throbbing and distorted, woven into some low end melody. The rest of the record is split pretty evenly between hushed whispery ambient drone, and weirdly distorted lo-fi grooves, standout's include the buzzy electro jam of "The Man In The High Castle", the cinematic krautrocky murk of "Double Star", the almost Chain Reaction dub of "Star Collector" and the droney buzz and grind of "Gleanings".
Falling somewhere between experimental turntable soundscapery and a moody cinematic DJ record, Beran has skillfully woven sonic straw into fuzzy, stuttery, groovy gold, taking turntables and dreamdrone ambience into rhythmic places until now, as far as we know completely unexplored! WAY recommended.
We'd be hard pressed to think of a more romantically beautiful and sexually provocative song, that doesn't fall prey to cloying sentiment or cheap thrills, than Serge Gainsbourg and Jane Birkin's "Je T'Aime...Moi Non Plus". But apparently the Pope at the time didn't agree and universally condemned the song which only garnered more international attention for the song and the couple who sang it. When will the Catholic Church ever learn?
This 1969 eponymous record is another classic reissue in the Gainsbourg catalog from Light In The Attic which also features the amazing songs "69 Annee Erotique" and "Jane B.", a french pop re-working of Chopin's Prelude No.4 in E minor. Sensual, playfully lurid, groovy, and albeit a bit corny at times (especially where they timely delve into pre-war popular song nostalgia), it's definitely a document of a controversial couple in love in full view of the world, and they're playing up the show with as much verve and joie de vivre as they can muster, which for the coolest of cool couples is one hell of a lot! Both the cd and the lp include liner notes with lyrics in French and English, original drawings and a telling interview about the recording with Jane Birkin herself! The 180 gram lp comes with a bonus 7" and a never before seen Serge and Jane comic drawn by David Lasky.
Sir Richard Bishop has been on a roll of late, making killer alchemical guitar compositions on a variety of labels such as Locust and Southern's Latitude series. Now perched for awhile on Drag City, Bishop has anointed us with probably his best and most diverse work yet. Featuring 11 concise compositions, Bishop's frame of reference varies wildly from flamenco to the early jazz stylings of Django Reinhardt. Most of the tracks have a much lighter tone compared to his last release "While My Guitar Violently Bleeds". But most notably on Polytheistic Fragments is the inclusion of a couple of amazingly beautiful piano compositions, such as the 8 minute centerpiece "Saraswati" that features languid piano cycles accompanied by droning tamboura that in a perfect world would be the only music we would ever need.
Finally, this rare 1978 French disco masterpiece sees the light of day in its original dark and sleazy form. A few years ago, the Rephlex label released a series of 12"s of tracks from this album claiming it was a rare discovery found in a French gas station from an obscure French library release under the name Junior Claristidge, a pseudonym for Bernard Fevre. Everyone originally thought this was a hoax, and was a modern group trying to create a fake retro disco record, but then Bernard Fevre, a French library composer from the late seventies came out of the woodwork and confirmed its origins. Shortly after, Fevre created a new project called Black Devil Disco Club, based on the successful response to the Black Devil rediscovery and used it to make new music based on old unused dance recordings from that period. Fevre is now getting a full on rediscovery with three of his most sought after library records from the seventies being reissued for the first time: Black Devil, Suspense and Cosmic 2043.
While the Black Devil Disco Club records were good, their steely sheen was a little too polished compared to the sonic dirtiness of the Black Devil originals, which sound like Giorgio Moroder and Arthur Russell in a darkly exotic reverie of drugged out fleshy vice. Strobes pulsing in a painted black room, poppers popping, hands groping, lots of congo driven disco beat and vocodered male and female vocals. Imagine Bruce Haack's Electric Lucifer in a hedonistic night of orgiastic dancing after the fall of man, and you get the idea. Enter if you dare!
Download card included!
Latest from these long time aQ faves, another blast of prismatic woozy electronic psychedelia, this one moving even more in a sort of warped electro-soul direction, but starting off like some futuristic take on Gary Glitter, all booming glam rock beats, and distorto buzz guitar, but instead of getting big and bombastic it blisses out, and become a weirdly propulsive kosmische style synth groove, with autotuned vocals and swirly shimmery melodies, all sort of washed out and trippy... and from that point on, the record drifts druggily into a full on mutant, home brewed alien strain of garbled DNA, groovy, cosmic disco, built from lazy, woozy crooned vocodered sexy boy vox, slithery melodies, whirling synths, all driven by stuttering robo-funk beats.
But this is BMSR, so even this glossy soulful side is laced with strange stretches of stripped down lysergic sonic shimmer, slo-mo jangle pop that almost sounds like cough syrup Smashing Pumpkins spinning at 16 rpm (check out "Psychic Love Damage"), but then it's right back into it, a sort of drowsy dancefloor fractured pop, slippery grooves, crazy catchy melodies, and twinkling harmonics, drifting in a soft focus chordal haze, peppered with slippery slide guitar, sounding like some sort of blissed out bluegrass laced electronica, while beneath the surface, collaged voices swirl above a softly roiling backdrop of gauzy ethereal dreampop, the sound building to a hazy soaring shoegazey M83 style electro-swirl!
In pretty much every respect, this sprawling new album from Black Moth Super Rainbow is overflowing with whimsy and trippy fun -- from the lengthy head-scratchin' song titles to the color-drenched cover art to the Bruce Haack-y vocoded vocals to the breezy ten-speed rollerskate synthesizer'd funkiness. Imagine if Black Dice or the Flaming Lips took a swing at electro and new wave, and your brain might go into a delirious tizzy with the delightful chew of Dandelion Gum.
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
SORRY.
When this record first came out, we all dug it, quite a bit, so we wrote a little blurb about it, sold a bunch. But somehow, this record, and this band, has continued to grow on us, big time! This, and the two BMSR reissues, get played incessantly, and now in retrospect, we LOVE LOVE LOVE this record. So much so that we feel like maybe we should go back and rewrite the review and gush endlessly. And maybe we will. Eventually. But for now, this record, this aQ fave, this genius chunk of dizzying synth pop perfection, has been reissued on vinyl, SUPER LIMITED, an ultra deluxe double lp, pressed on extra thick swirled pink vinyl, super heavy full color gatefold sleeve, each hand numbered, all in the upper 400's as it's already out of print, each with a scratch and sniff bubblegum bubble on the front cover! And as if that weren't enough, there's also am exclusive bonus track, that's not on the cd, and is only available HERE!
Until we have time to rewrite the review, and blather on endlessly about how much we love it, this short and sweet review will have to do:
In pretty much every respect, this sprawling new album from Black Moth Super Rainbow is overflowing with whimsy and trippy fun -- from the lengthy head-scratchin' song titles to the color-drenched cover art to the Bruce Haack-y vocoded vocals to the breezy ten-speed rollerskate synthesizer'd funkiness. Imagine if Black Dice or the Flaming Lips took a swing at electro and new wave, and your brain might go into a delirious tizzy with the delightful chew of Dandelion Gum.
LIMITED TO 500 COPIES! We only got 15. Already out of print, so sorry, these will probably go crazy quick...
As of late 2008 and early 2009, there's been some serious hubbub over Slumberland, the stalwart indie label of Brit-inspired, shoegazing bliss pop, thanks to a couple of kick ass records from Crystal Stilts and Pains Of Being Pure At Heart. So a revisitation into perhaps the quintessential Slumberland outfit seems appropriate. Black Tambourine was a shortlived project featuring two of the guys from Velocity Girl, a chanteuse named Pam Berry, and Slumberland label boss Mike Schulman. They only released three singles, contributed a track or two to compilations, and played less than five shows before breaking up in 1991. Go figure that Complete Recordings anthologizes all of these tracks plus an unreleased single.
Black Tambourine's songs begin as jangly, melodic pop which gets tousled about in a blur of amplifier distortion piled onto reverb piled onto more amplifier distortion and just a little more reverb. Yup, it's the same wonderful sound that was also broadcast from the Shop Assistants, My Bloody Valentine (circa Isn't Anything, well cuz Loveless hadn't been released yet!), Jesus & Mary Chain, the Pastels, and almost any given band on Creation circa 1988. But no matter how great that all consuming shoegaze sound can be, the band has gotta have good songwriting chops; and Black Tambourine had 'em for sure. At times, there's that ramshackle quality of good old American DIY indie pop, but for the most part, the songs are effortlessly catchy and melodic with a swagger pushed forth by Pam Berry's reverb drenched and melancholy vocals. Still sounds great after all these years!
A previous version of this collection became available again not too long ago, and we were so excited we decided to make it our Record Of The Week, and then whattaya know, a year later, Slumberland go ahead and repackage it, reissue it, AND add a handful of bonus tracks (ironic, since the earlier edition was entitled "Complete Recordings"). And this time they've also put it out on vinyl, too!! So if you negelected to pick this up the first time around, now's the time, and if you did, you just gotta figure out if you want to buy it again for the four bonus tracks, which are pretty dang great. Here's what we said about the so-called Complete Recordings version:
As of late 2008 and early 2009, there's been some serious hubbub over Slumberland, the stalwart indie label of Brit-inspired, shoegazing bliss pop, thanks to a couple of kick ass records from Crystal Stilts and Pains Of Being Pure At Heart. So a revisitation into perhaps the quintessential Slumberland outfit seems appropriate. Black Tambourine was a shortlived project featuring two of the guys from Velocity Girl, a chanteuse named Pam Berry, and Slumberland label boss Mike Schulman. They only released three singles, contributed a track or two to compilations, and played less than five shows before breaking up in 1991. Go figure that Complete Recordings anthologizes all of these tracks plus an unreleased single.
Black Tambourine's songs begin as jangly, melodic pop which gets tousled about in a blur of amplifier distortion piled onto reverb piled onto more amplifier distortion and just a little more reverb. Yup, it's the same wonderful sound that was also broadcast from the Shop Assistants, My Bloody Valentine (circa Isn't Anything, well cuz Loveless hadn't been released yet!), Jesus & Mary Chain, the Pastels, and almost any given band on Creation circa 1988. But no matter how great that all consuming shoegaze sound can be, the band has gotta have good songwriting chops; and Black Tambourine had 'em for sure. At times, there's that ramshackle quality of good old American DIY indie pop, but for the most part, the songs are effortlessly catchy and melodic with a swagger pushed forth by Pam Berry's reverb drenched and melancholy vocals. Still sounds great after all these years!
Wow! To mark the centenary of Louis Feuillade's Fantomas silent film series, James Blackshaw was invited to perform a live score for the fifth and final film, Le Faux Magistrat in Paris on Halloween night of last year. The Fantomas film series, based on the popular character of French crime fiction, a symbol of terror and master of disguise, is an exciting match for Blackshaw who has evolved over the past few years from solo guitar work to full orchestral composition. The group assembled here includes Duane Pitre and Simon Scott from Slowdive as well as multi-instrumentalist Charlotte Glasson providing violin, vibraphone and various wind instruments. In a beautifully brooding score that at times channels David Shire's The Conversation soundtrack as one of several reccurring instrumental motifs, Blackshaw alternates between guitar and piano in a tense and moving score that while atmospheric, never seems to take rest.
Fantastic!
With each new James Blackshaw release, we're always amazed at how someone who works within such a small musical framework can continuously exceed our expectations. Definitely a favorite among favorites of solo guitarists, Blackshaw has bulked up his arsenal of compositional approaches by introducing for the first time the use of piano as a key element. Bookending the album are two long form pieces of solo piano in a minimalist style that remind us of Charlemagne Palestine or Lubomyr Melnyk. When the twelve string is first heard on the second track, it's not before we're set up with a foundation of resonant timbres of violin and viola (played by Fran Bury) that give weight to the airy modal improvisations of the guitar. Adding subtle layers of richness and dynamics, the strings ground and support the ringing overtones of the 12 string creating complex harmonies to the pulsating melodies. We can't imagine we'll ever tire of hearing Blackshaw's shimmering textural pieces. Amazing how sound so deep, dark, damp and resonant can be so transcendentally uplifting.
James Blake is a curious case. We wonder if he had some standard folk guitar or piano backing to his frigid soul songs, would we be into this that much? But Blake's songs are far from standard, and despite the mainstream pop and RnB vocabulary he borrows heavily from (Auto-Tune, guest rapper stints, the gospel-tinged vocalizations), he creates something quite unpredictable and beautifully unique in the strange fractured arrangements. Like Nina Simone in reservedly dramatic avant-electronica mode, Blake keeps his songwriting emotionally effective while keeping enough distance so as not to become vocally overwrought or musically anthemic. The chilled production evokes an atmosphere of dreamy spaciousness, pillowy clouds of piano, filtered samples, bass pulses and far away post-dubstep rhythms. Blake is as close as we're probably going to get to Arthur Russell and Burial having a beautiful musical child together.
This would have been a perfect entry on last week's "Ragadelic" in-between list, the debut solo recording from Guy Blakeslee, who most folks know as the man behind The Entrance Band. This is super limited, only 50 copies made, so we won't go into too much detail about it except that it is utterly amazing! Five long-form solo guitar excursions that cover Fahey-ish odes ("Oh Johnnie") to more raga-style workouts (check the Fahey-inspired titles like "Solitary Ecstasy Holiday Smile Prayer"). The last song, "The Night They Came From The Sky", is a 17 minute mind-expanding stew of looping reverse-delayed riffs that wind and coil in infinite meditative patterns. Rumor has it more volumes are in the works. A fantastic set. Get it while you can!
We flipped for the first installment in Guy Blakeslee's Thirdeye Memories cd-r series, which we described on the last list in our review of Volume 1 as falling somewhere between Fahey-like devotional Appalachia and more droned out abstract looped and layered psychedelic ragas, and for those of you (like us) who felt like one volume just wasn't enough, well, you might want to grab one of these before they're gone, cuz like the first one it's limited to just FIFTY copies (and we do have a tiny handful left of volume 1 if you missed out). Blakeslee is the frontman for psych rockers The Entrance Band, but for these solo excursions, the sound is much more intimate, and delicate and lovely, the opener here is a glistening sprawl of dreamlike guitar melodies, super fluid finger picking, the vibe almost carol-like, a warm glowing swirl of lovely Appalachian folk. But it doesn't take long for the disc to drift into far trippier realms, "Digital Sage" takes the sound of the opener and turns it inside out, flips it backwards, adding gloriously slippery reverse melodies and woozy shimmery FX blur, it's the sort of dreamy sonic trip out we could get lost in forever. And so it goes, the whole record unfurling in a washed out kosmische dream folk haze, slipping from crystalline beauty to dreamily dizzying trippy psych swirl, and back again, perfectly balancing sweet melodies, with something a bit more shadowy and lysergic. Like the first volume, fantastic! And like the first volume, packaged in a simple screen printed origami style sleeve, LIMITED TO 50 COPIES, each one hand numbered!
Everyone at aQ is super open minded when it comes to music, we all love all kinds of sounds, but each of us definitely has our favorite, our specialties, whether it be black metal, or indie rock or drone or post rock or power pop or whatever. So when a record shows up that has *everybody* freaking out, that's usually a sign that said record is something special, and in those cases we definitely try to mark the occasion by making that record our Record Of The Week.
Such is the case with The Fields by Blank Dogs, or should we say Blank Dog singular as this is a one man operation, some cat named Mike Sniper who for the last few years has been practically gushing limited cd-r's and tapes and short run releases, most so limited that for most of us, The Fields is our first real exposure to Sniper's gorgeous woozy lo-fi new wave, and new wave is really what this is, whereas a lot of the other Blank Dogs releases were super noisy and abrasive, The Fields is hooky and catchy and jangly, total perfect gloom pop, albeit drenched in plenty of tape hiss and amp buzz. Equal parts The Cure and Joy Division, huge fuzzed out downer basslines, simple drum rhythms or programmed beats, all wreathed in thick swirls of murky effects, fuzzy clouds of bloop and bleep, synthesizers spewing squiggly melodies, or unfurling thick undulating ribbons of warm buzz, and then the vocals, deep and drowsy, weary and worn, a mournful croon, super emotional and darkly evocative, all of those parts stitched together into haphazard perfect pop gems.
It's a super short record, seven songs in twenty minutes, but it's darn near perfect, the opening bass line and drum part are total Cure worship, all gothy and gloomy, with an irresistible hook buried in the mix, the deep main croon balanced by a weird processed almost falsetto, fucked up effects careening all over the place in the background, smoothly segueing into "Now Signals" the indie mixtape hit of the year if there ever was one, a sort of Interpol meets Magnetic Fields by way of Sebadoh, a simple guitar jangle over woozy synths, and a sweet sad boy vocal, until it shifts gear into a killer super rocking, heavy guitar bridge, that slips into a warm, almost heavy chorus, before returning to that lo-fi jangle and shimmer of the verse.
"Passing The Light" has a wicked blown out buzzy bass line, that would shame Interpol, the Joy Division melody strung between a constellation of glistening effects, the vocals dripping with delay and reverb and distortion, and again, all wrapped around a wicked hook. The last few tracks get almost frenetic, and mix in some classic pop era Eno into the moody new wave gloom, finishing things off with the weirdly ebullient "Spinning", that manages to glow and pulse with energy while retaining plenty of the rest of the record's glorious downer doompop vibe.
Of course this is on Woodsist, which has been on a roll lately releasing one amazing gem after another: Crystal Stilts, Wavves, Pocahaunted, Meneguar, and now Blank Dogs!! Even though we're only a few weeks into 2009, there's no doubt this disc will find its way onto lots of folks year end lists!
When we kept reading bad reviews for the latest Blonde Redhead record, one that comes after of a four year hiatus, we were curious to hear how bad it could possibly be. Or actually was. But you know what? We took one listen and didn't find it that bad at all, in fact we ended up liking it quite a bit and have been listening to it a lot. Ok, perhaps some of us here are indifferent, but there is nothing here that is so outright horrible that we feel warrants the level of dismissive vitriol we've read about it.
After the bright drum machine-driven pop of Penny Sparkle, Barragan is a much more nuanced and textured affair, elegant, subtle, sexy, and beautifully sad. We suppose it's the slow burning reveal of it, the sparse arrangements, the late night world it embraces, filled with mysterious sounds and instrumentation of flutes, harpsichords and acoustic guitars, that perhaps leave folks with not enough to immediately grab onto sonically. But that is exactly why some of us like it. It's actually a lovely record that harkens back to their moodier atmospheric albums like Melody of Certain Damaged Lemons or Misery Is A Butterfly...
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
SORRY.
When this latest Frkwys collaboration was first announced between New York psych rockers Blues Control and experimental new age composer, Laraaji (Edward Larry Gordon), we were curious as to what this would sound like. But ever since we got it in the store, it's fast becoming our favorite pairing in the series, which is no small feat, since we absolutely adored the Arp & Anthony Moore collaboration as well as the Juliana Barwick & Ikue Mori release. Blues Control has toned down their usual rollicking psych kraut chug, and instead create four long-form interconnecting pieces with tempered down cosmic guitar and electronic atmospheric manipulations, while Laraaji plays treated zither and African string instruments over them. Building from quiet oceanic ambiance to slowly evolving cosmically focused and tripped out deep spiritual meditations which feature choral and resonant vocal accompaniment provided by Laraaji. On the third song, "City of Love", a percussive momentum with a heavier guitar drone foundation briefly intensifies, while clouds of kora, kalimba and mouth harp vibrational tones bounce back and forth across the aural field to gently lilting psychedelic effect. For late night devotional listening for any fan of modern day psych and new age, this is simply stunning!!
It's pretty phenomenal that this record went from getting the suspicious side-eye when we first took it in on consignment, to becoming one of our favorite "WTF?" records of the year! When it first appeared, no one seemed to know where it came from (it had been brought in by Blunt himself, one day). And we weren't too sold on the cover, a generic photograph that looked like it was shot in the eighties, of this fellow Blunt, standing with a woman (a close friend of his, in a head to toe orange outfit that looks like it could have been prison garb, and who as it turns out, may no longer be alive) in front of a Mercedes parked in front of the mural on the side of the O'Farrell Theater on Polk street in San Francisco. Also, whenever there's a bunch of "ASCAP" logos plastered all over the front and back cover, our internal "uh-oh" meter goes way off.
So it just sat on our new arrivals shelf for a few weeks. But then a couple of folks (one of whom runs the Gloriette label, who have supplied us with some Ariel Pink and Nite Jewel records) started asking about it, because they had heard about this record, so we gave it a listen and were pretty surprised and rather blown away by what we were hearing. A lo-fi but breezy outsider funk, made with repetitive cheap-sounding keyboards loops and tones (the kind being currently exploited by Dam-Funk, Ariel Pink, and James Pants), strange metallic tropical guitar tones that sound more like steel drums and flute sounds than actual guitar, and sly, laid-back vocals and catchy, infectiously naive grooves that work their way into our heads and never let go. Everybody here ended up really really digging it.
We sold one copy immediately to someone in the store when playing it, and then when we tried to contact Blunt to get more copies, we discovered that somehow we'd neglected to get his contact info, d'oh! The cd had no contact information, and searches online only revealed that the title track, a raunchy but coded come-on to a sexy stranger, was included on a James Pants mix. This only piqued our interest further, as Blunt's skewed Caribbean inflected songs would obviously be simpatico with James Pants' more recent tropical themed output. We could also see folks into Ariel Pink and Dam-Funk getting WAY into this. So we thought maybe this record was a rare private press record from the eighties. It does seem to have a strange hard-to-pin-down-time-wise quality.
Thankfully, Blunt eventually came back in and we got more copies and found out that he had pressed vinyl copies too. He also told us that this record was recorded ten years ago in 2000, but that didn't diminish our new found love for this record's questionable mystery, as it still predates all of the artists mentioned above that it reminds us of, though we're pretty sure Blunt probably has never heard of any of them. It also has the left of center oddness of other outsider funk artists like Tonetta, or Wicked Witch, albeit way more toned down than either of those two. Not that it's completely off the wall weird, but it's one of those records that we went into with such hesitation and were pleasantly surprised that we then became totally enamored with its home-brewed charm.
The lp is 5 tracks, with extra shorter versions of the songs "Fly Guy" and "Gentle Persuasion" and comes housed in an old school white cut-out 12" sleeve. The cd version has two extra songs and instrumental versions of four of the tracks. Oh, and the vinyl has a gold star sticker that boldly proclaims "HIT!" We couldn't agree more!
RECORD STORE DAY 2015!!
Here's one of this year's crop of Record Store Day releases we were most excited about, and thankfully managed to get a good number of - which was kind of amazing, since it is limited to just 350 copies!! So we have a bunch (for now) to review, which was also helped by the fact that, d'oh, we somehow forgot to include it on the list of RSD goodies we posted last weekend. Anyway, so glad to be able to list this now 'cause Doug is very special to us.
Faithful followers of the aQ list probably remember when we made Doug Hream Blunt's Gentle Persuasion cd and 12" a Record Of The Week a couple of years ago. A home-brewed breezy outsider funk masterpiece about woman's butts that was so catchy and infectious, likely recorded by Doug back in the eighties, but not widely released until around the year 2000 (we could never really get an official answer). We had no idea of the cult appeal of Doug Blunt's music when he one day dropped by and consigned the record, and apparently neither did he, or at least he never alluded to it or seemed to care much about it. But ever since we listed it, we have sold it quite regularly to many customers who seek us out specifically just to buy a copy, and seem quite surprised that we actually can get it. The cd version is out of print now, but we have and can still get more of the original 12".
Then, this Doug Hream Blunt release on David Byrne's Luaka Bop label was announced for Record Store Day this year, surprise, and it turns out Doug is on the brink of getting a full scale archival release of his music this summer (just like the label did for Tim Maia and William Onyeabor)!. Such great news for someone so super nice and low-key about himself, really we are super-psyched for him!. So with this special RSD 12" remixes of the song "Gentle Persuasion" by renowned remixers, British DJ duo Psychemagik and Hype Williams aka Dean Blunt (apparently Dean Blunt named himself after Doug), we sort of get a teaser of what makes Doug's music so cool. The choice of Psychmagik and Hype Williams as remixers are on point, because both are known for their less is more approach, taking out more than they put in and emphasizing and extending the money shots of the track. The Psychemagik "Move Your Butt" remix focuses on the groove, bumping up the bass and drums and reducing much of the main lyrics to just edited snippets like "Girl, Move Your Butt" in phased out psychedelic echoes while still including much of the steel drum keytar solo and female backing vocals of the original (see the original review for a sampling of the original track). The Hype Williams side "get choong and look at the sky" remix is much stranger, because if it is the same speed as the Psychmagik side, then this is the screwwwwwed version, totally slow and murked out, also editing the vocals completely out except for the female backing track and keytar solo in a strange dreamy "warts-and-all" twist. If it was meant to be faster, which it can be, than it is sort of a more stripped down version of the original. Hard to tell, because the release doesn't even mention who's doing the remixing, we had to go online to figure it out. But truth be told we prefer to hear it much more slooooowed down.
The 12", which is housed in a blank white single sleeve with only the Luaka Bop logo on the center label, does come with an elaborate album-sized gatefold "magazine", which is supposedly dead stock of an Italian sex mag from the nineties that has Doug's name written everywhere along with sexual fantasies and soft-core retro porn material reminiscent of Hustler's Forum, along with full color cardstock insert artwork. Weird. Not sure what that's all about, but it's quite (literally) cheeky!
But we also have a very special treat for our customers in that we got Doug himself to come in and SIGN every copy of this we had left (with the help of his young granddaughter Juanita who added cute hearts to Doug's name!). Sorry if you picked this up before it was signed, Doug didn't show up until the Monday after RSD! Needless to say this is very limited and likely all the copies we'll ever get, so do yourself a favor and move your butt on this!!!
We can't believe it's been five years since Doug Hream Blunt himself walked into our store and consigned his self-released recordings of home-brewed, proto-chillwave dance funk, recorded with washy and chirpy synths and genuinely out there guitar solos, with songs about dancing, fly guys and ladies' butts. Kind of a smoother Wesley Willis (ok, much smoother!) with Jimi Hendrix dreams, Blunt's genuinely infectious musical enthusiasm shined through on each track. We made Gentle Persuasion record of the week back in 2010, without knowing much about its backstory. Doug was very vague on details too, saying the recording was from 2000, but we believe that was when it was pressed, but not recorded. Having suffered a stroke a few years before, he couldn't go into great length about the recording at the time (he's doing much better now, as evidenced by our recent record signing event!), but we had an inkling that the recordings were known in certain crate-digger / DJ circles, which were immediately confirmed once we had it on our website and orders from all over the world started pouring in.
Seriously, we have sold tons of his release, and now lo and behold, Doug is finally having his well-deserved, big moment of larger recognition and discovery via David Byrne's Luaka Bop label, with this reissue of his complete recordings which include the two previously self-released discs we previously listed: Gentle Persuasion and Big Top, remastered and put together for the first time - these tracks have never sounded better! A lo-fi but breezy outsider funk, made with repetitive cheap-sounding keyboards loops and tones (the kind being currently exploited by Dam-Funk, Ariel Pink, and James Pants, all Doug Hream Blunt fans by the way), strange metallic tropical guitar tones that sound more like steel drums and flute sounds than actual guitar, and sly, laidback vocals and catchy, infectiously naive grooves that work their way into our heads and never let go. So delightful!!
And we finally get more of the story behind these recordings: Back in 1985, when Doug was 35, he decided he wanted to learn guitar and found an extended learning class called 'How To Form A Band' run by Victor Flaviani out of his garage. Victor taught Doug the guitar, even though Victor barely knew the instrument himself, and Doug set about writing and recording the songs with his other class mates. We remember seeing the video of Gentle Persuasion we found on Vimeo from a cable access TV video with Doug and what seemed to be an all-girl band, which turns out were his fellow classmates, which included Victor and his wife Angela too on drums and guitar respectively.
It's pretty phenomenal that this record went from getting the suspicious side-eye when we first took it in on consignment, five years ago, to becoming one of our favorite "WTF?" records ever. Not that it's so impossibly strange, but it's a genuine home-grown San Francisco DIY funk artifact with minimal ambitions that is finally being turned on to a larger audience, and we couldn't be happier for Doug! For fans of that Personal Space compilation of private press electronic soul, Dam-Funk, Ariel Pink or Dean Blunt, who apparently took the Blunt name in tribute to Doug!
Download code included with the vinyl btw. Also btw, if you missed the remix 12" that Luaka Bop put out as a teaser for this earlier this year for Record Store Day, we still have three or four signed copies of that left in stock...
Another winner from the Holodeck label, who have brought us stellar releases from Marie Davidson, Smokey Emory, Troller, Survive and Sungod and others mostly from the vital contemporary electronic scene in Austin, Texas. Boan is a collaboration between Ssleeperhold's Jose Cota and Mariana Saldana (ex - //TENSE//) who, outside of their lauded individual creative efforts, are widely known as two thirds of the now defunct electro-trio Medio Mutante. We dug Ssleeperhold's grave rave synth confections, and here with Saldana's detached goth-romance delivery, the duo have crafted a superb minimal wave acid dance classic. Brooding, sultry and hypnotic, utilizing an array of modern synths, sequencers and drum machines and recorded with the best studio production from Survive's Michael Stein, Boan offers a dark flip side to the retro Italo grooves of the Italians Do It Better label, even sounds like something unearthed by Dark Entries from Italy or Spain circa 1983. Fantastic!
Long-awaited vinyl reissue of one of the dreamiest and influential records of the nineties has finally arrived! We were sure we must have written a review sometime back in the day, but its 1998 release long predated the list, and whenever there was a subsequent reissue, we only mentioned what an essential and classic album it is, never really needing to quantify why it was so, because basically we have to assume everyone knows about it, right? But fifteen years on, let's try to put it in words how much we love this record and what it means when we have said in so many following reviews since this came out about that ubiquitous Boards of Canada "sound".
Having released a couple of obscure singles and a hard-to find full length, Boards of Canada seemed to have come out of nowhere when they made their major-label debut. Named after and inspired by the seventies documentary film company The National Film Board of Canada, this band of Scottish brothers Marcus Eoin and Mike Sandison created one of the first IDM outfits that built off the futuristic electronic and downtempo beatscapery of genre pioneers Autechre and Aphex Twin while infusing their music with a warm, nostalgic and sun-dappled melancholy. It was hard at first to pinpoint what created that distinct nostalgic feeling, because back then not many folks were as clued into the world of library music (essentially instrumental soundtrack music made by private companies for use in commercial and industrial films including the educational-minded National Film Board of Canada) as we are now. Many of the melodies and themes on Music Has the Right to Children seem to be lifted straight from those elementary school educational films, the type that inhabited our childhoods as well. The music gives off a warbled lilting pastoral vibe that prismatizes into a sunburst of kaleidoscopic reverie, evoking memories of hip educational graphics of basic science concepts like geometrical forms, color spectrums and weather patterns that would allude to a larger sense of wonder that we, as adult listeners, no longer seemed to have. How it was made, whether through instrumental musicianship, a sophisticated sampling and filtering process, or a combination of both remains mysterious today. A few years back when the philosophic concept of Hauntology (a past premonition of a future that never was, to put it very simply) was being bandied about a lot with groups like Broadcast & The Focus Group and The Caretaker, many have spoken of this album as a key musical touchstone. It does indeed have a strange quality of being both of and beyond its time, a quality in turn that continues to bedazzle, beguile and bewitch. Essential!
It's been eight long years since we last heard from this much loved but mysterious electronic duo and every new release always seem to bring a lot of fanfare and debate. It's always a difficult proposition to have a highly anticipated release from a band with a devoted, perhaps even cultish, following, as it seems that everyone wants it to sound different enough from their classic sound yet still retain the same qualities that endeared you to that band in the first place. And of course, if it leans too close to either side of that spectrum, division occurs. Folks either find comfort in the familiar, or are completely indifferent. Or are thrilled by the new direction, or angered by it. Case in point, the last My Bloody Valentine record.
Boards of Canada have never deviated much from what they're best at: well composed and structured melodies that have a worn, warm and warbled sense of nostalgia. Aged library sounds, abstract organic design and educational nature film scores were often the heart of the bands reference points. On 2005's Campfire Phases they added more folk music atmospheres with delicate guitar work, but it wasn't significantly different from their most heralded and beloved release 1998's Music Has The Right To Children. Both records even had similar cover art, which of course had some fans crying foul!
So it's 2013 and we finally have a brand new record and it's definitely their most mature and complex record to date. We're also happy to report that it's fast becoming one of our favorite releases this year. While it has certain touchstones that make it sound distinctly like a BoC record, the feel overall is much darker, tense and moodier, reading like a score to some environmental science fiction film like Idaho Transfer or Phase IV (or more recently, Beyond The Black Rainbow!). Just check out some of the song titles: "Reach For the Dead", "Cold Earth", "Sick Times", "Come To Dust". Even the album title and the cover shot (of San Francisco, taken from the Alameda Naval Shipyards) gives off a Soylent Green vibe. The nostalgic quality that permeates the band's sound has a more toxic feel this time around too, as if hearkening back to a place now poisoned, a kind of daylight horror dread.
The opening track, "Gemini" starts out with a crackly filmstrip fanfare like from some old seventies educational film, and that sort of faded, gristly, sci-fi vibe pervades throughout the first track, a dark, blurred, fuzzy field of pulsing synths and ominous atmospheres, it's immediately evident, that the new BoC is a much darker beast than the group who brought us the pastoral, autumnal Music Has The Right To Children. Even when the second track kicks in, the sound remains shadowy and sinister, the pulsing rhythm wreathed in a field of crackle. The sound does eventually lighten a bit, processed voices drift in (reminding us of The Conet Project!), rumbling bass melodies surface from below, until eventually some of the old BoC returns, big beats, a churning propulsive rhythm, locked into a disjointed, but weirdly hypnotic groove. But almost as soon as it gets going, the track ends, leading directly into another haunting cinematic sprawl of swirling synths, and pulsating melodies, sounding like an alternate soundtrack to the aforementioned recent throwback surreal sci-fi art house film Beyond The Black Rainbow, conjuring up all sorts of lysergic images and psychedelically induced fever dreams. And so it goes, BoC fusing the old loping, meandering beat driven dreaminess, to something a shade darker. Some tracks locked into tranced out smoldering grooves, draped in chiming softly distorted melodies, others, brooding menacingly, some peppered with creepy processed voices, only adding to the seventies creepy sci-fi/horror flick vibe, and still others blossoming into time-lapse slow motion sprawling expanses of experimental rhythmic textures, shifting dreamily, tonal colors bleeding into each other, woozily prismatic, like the music from some old crumbling, planetarium show. While the old BoC sound surfaces throughout, Tomorrow's Harvest, definitely exists in a much bleaker soundworld, where Tomorrow's Harvest is perhaps meant as a cautionary tale, these sounds the score to a future world scorched and barren, a world of faded memories of what once was, and what could have been, had it not all gone terribly wrong...
So when you were a kid, what do you think your Mom got up to while you were at school, or out playing with your pals? Doing laundry? Cleaning the house? Doing the dishes? A little gardening? Or maybe playing bridge? Canasta? Going to the grocery store? How about collecting and building analog synthesizers? Building a soundproof recording studio in the extra room? Recording strange space-y minimal electronic music on reel to reel tapes? Or building an 'orgon accumulator' in the backyard? Such were the activities of a mild mannered housewife named Ursula Bogner, who in addition to being a pharmacist, as well as a loving wife and mother, just so happened to also be obsessed with electronic music and analog synthesizers, but unlike others with similar interests (were there other 30 something housewives so obsessed?), Bogner didn't just read about electronic music, she attended seminars, followed the activities of various groups and musicians (even apparently sharing her children's enthusiasm for new wave pop!) eventually deciding to create music herself.
She never released any recordings, didn't even really make public her hobby, instead, she simply spent her free time, creating, composing, recording, experimenting, for over 20 years, amassing an incredible body of work. All of that wouldn't merit anything but a cursory glance and maybe a chuckle, if the music weren't amazing, but it is, fantastical and inspired, primitive and raw, playful and childlike, but also, haunting and mysterious, otherworldly, and so incredibly varied, from spare academic sounding minimalism, to Perrey & Kingsley style playfulness, to super stark click and skitter that would be right at home on Raster-Noton, to swirling fantastical spaced out soundscapes that could have been sixties sci-fi soundtracks. The sounds are so evocative, so mysterious, it almost seems impossible that they were recorded by a Mom in a spare room in a house in the suburbs.
The collection opens with "Begleitung Fur Tuba", which indeed features tuba-like tones, locked into a playful grove with a bleepy bloopy rhythm, which is eventually joined by streaks of static, and a warbly main melody. From there, highlights include "Proto" which is kaleidoscopic and groovy with a super minimal click-track rhythm. "2 Ton" is almost like space age lounge music, with it's reverbed guitar like shimmer, and slithery tempo. "Speichen" is another playful number, the burbles and bloops, and definitely predicts groups like James Bong, Luke Vibert, Boards Of Canada and the like. "Punkte" is another minimal groover, with a hissy static rhythm, a bloopy bassline, and all manner of descending and ascending electronic tones, as well as pizzicato bleeps that almost sound like an alien thumb piano. The longest track is "Soloresonanzen" and is maybe the dreamiest, taking the minimal click of Raster-Noton, and draping it over slowly shifting layers of electronic whir and buzz, peppered with bits of click and glitch, textural hiss, woozy melodic fragments, very dreamlike and meditative. And finally the record finishes with a brief burst of tangly scribbly electronic whir and skree, all mad scientist machines gone haywire, but deftly arranged into a pretty alien lullaby, weird and wonderful.
Bogner's music was discovered via some pretty incredible happenstance, Jan Jelinek, who runs the Faitiche label, met Bogner's son on a plane and the two got to talking, Jelinek was an electronic musician, so was Bogner's deceased Mother Weirdly enough, and well, the rest is history. Or is it? There has been much talk that this is all a massive hoax, or more correctly, the ultimate concept album. Carefully crafted down to the tiniest details, photos, back story, Bogner's artwork, everything. In some ways it doesn't really matter, in fact, it's almost more impressive if the whole thing was in fact fabricated, but you know what, fuck it, it's so much more fun to just go along with it...
The cd is gorgeously packaged in a thick book-like digipak, with extensive liner notes from Jan Jelinek, notes on each song, lots of photos, as well as various reproductions of Bogner's various outer space linocuts.
Several years ago, we made the first archival release from housewife turned experimental electronic musician Ursula Bogner our Record Of The Week, even knowing full well, that there probably is no Ursula Bogner. On the surface it definitely seemed like the find of a lifetime. The story involved someone's casual interaction with a man on a plane, discovering that this man was the son of a virtually unheard experimental electronic musician, a mom and pharmacist, who had built a recording studio in their home, and who had recorded for twenty years, those recordings proving to be impossibly prescient, the sort of sounds that would stand up to similar recordings at the time by Delia Derbyshire and the BBC Radiophonic Workshop. That initial release was filled with all manner of documentation, photos, notes, like we said, it seemed like the real deal. But it also seemed like an ingeniously perpetrated hoax. The man in question who supposedly ran into Bogner's son on a plane, was none other than Jan Jelinek, whose music is not all that dissimilar to Bogner's. Perhaps we're just the suspicious types, but there seems to be little or no information about Bogner, other than that provided by the label, which could just speak to her absolute obscurity, but could also speak to the fact that it's all a put on. To be honest, we want to believe it. How cool is that story? But that said, as we mentioned in the review of that first release, if it IS a hoax, we like it even more. So meticulously planned, photos, hand written notes, then the music� Similar to those funereal violin cds we carried a while back (that guy not only recorded all the cds, he also wrote a whole book about the history of funereal violin!), it would require a whole other level of creativity, but enough about all that, it is ultimately about the music, as much as we love the story, true or not, and like the first record, this is another fantastic collection of 'early' primitive recordings, these newly unearthed tapes featuring a focus on the voice, which was not present before, and our first actual exposure to the voice of Bogner, who supposedly passed away in 1994. Opening with piano and vox, the sound fluctuates as the tape speed falters, the sound is murky and definitely sounds old, plenty of spaced out effects, female voices processed into mysterious melodies, percolating rhythms, primitive and very low fidelity. Some of the tracks feature kitschy sounding organs and snippets of looped pop music, but they are transformed into cool sixties style tape music, occasionally lush and lovely, other timeshaunting and austere, there's one track in particular which finds Bogner reciting numbers over a backdrop of hiss and static and blurred melody, that most definitely is a nod, intentional or not, to the perennial aQ fave The Conet Project.
As with the other record, there are expertly penned liner notes, translations of original texts that Bogner wrote to accompany the pieces (especially the boxed cd version which features a massive 100+ page book of liner notes and artwork), all very cryptic and Eno-esque, tons of photos, of installations, of the reel of tape these tracks were discovered on as well as Bogner herself (again, especially in the book that accompanies the cd!). Very recommended of course, for fans of vintage sixties experimental music, of Jan Jelinek, and of impeccably crafted musical hoaxes.
We had almost given up on the current state of electronica when all of a sudden we started getting some pretty amazing electronic albums, of all different varieties in the last few months. Whether it's killer Dubstep from Boxcutter, the glitchy laptop stutter of Tuk, or Lindstrom's infectious Nordic beardo-disco, our electronic section has gotten a much needed face-lift and a serious boost of exciting energy! Now thanks to Kompakt (one of our all time favorite labels, home to the Pop Ambient series of course) we've got two more electronic gems to fall in love with. The Field's From Here We Go Sublime (also highlighted on this list) and this debut by Brazilian producer/sound architect Gui Boratto. Possessing a punch and vibrancy not usually associated with Kompakt, who are known more for their dreamy soundscapes and simple house-y pulses, Chromophobia is one of those records where the music inside matches the cover art perfectly. Rich bright colors in all sorts of pleasurable shapes, clean and smart and stylish. Proving that dance minded music doesn't need to be dumb, this has us thinking quite a bit of Double Figure era Plaid, or the perfect left-field microhouse of Isolee's We Are Monster. Throw in some rich sonic textures that had Andee thinking of Fridge for a moment, and the gorgeous sole vocal track "Beautiful Life" and you have all the right ingredients for one of the best electronic records of the year!
Electronic musical pioneer David Borden might not be as famous as a name as Robert Moog, or Don Buchla, but he was in all the same right places at the same right times, beta-testing Moog synthesizer prototypes, taking them apart, blowing them up and repairing them repeatedly in an effort to perfect patching techniques. He formed the first all synthesizer ensemble, Mother Mallard's Portable Masterpiece Company, in 1969, and headed the one of the first record labels devoted to New music and Minimalist composition, Earthquack, that inspired later more prodigious labels such as Lovely Music.
Music for Amplified Keyboards is his 1981 unsung masterpiece made from solo recordings made in the late seventies after the ensemble had called it quits. Long unavailable and remastered from a once thought lost safety master recording, it is great to see this unheralded composer finally getting some recognition. The RVNG label had done a Freakways installment with Borden that included modern synth purveyors such as James Ferraro, Daniel Lopatin and Laurel Halo, but it's nice to hear his original compositions on their own. On par with the works of Michael Nyman, Philip Glass, and Steve Reich, the four long tracks on this release contain a minimalist repetition that is both fluid and continuous, but there is also a pastoral landscapular ennui that has touches of the romantic and human, chilly but not at all cold or distant. Incredibly performed and executed. Another fantastic archival release from Spectrum Spools!
We first heard Lo Borges as singer and songwriter on the mighty Clube Da Esquina, Milton Nascimento's 1972 epic double record, we listed awhile back. That record has been a consistently steady seller since we listed it, and with good reason, it's incredible! But while Nascimento and Borges actually collaborated together on much of it, it's mostly regarded as a Nascimento record. So it's great to see Lo Borge's self titled debut solo album from the same year finally reissued by the Water label, to shine a much deserved spotlight on this underrated artist. And we have to say, it's equally as incredible and essential as Clube De Esquina, Eduardo Mateo's Mateo Solo Bien Se Lame, Caetano Veloso's Transa, or Gilberto Gil's Cerebro Electronico! With a nod to the cover art, those are big shoes indeed!
Recorded when he was just entering his twenties, the scope of artistry on display seems to be by someone so much more experienced. Not only is Borges at the top of his game as a singer and songwriter, but the arrangements and musicianship are just as dazzling. Most of the songs barely squeak over the two minute mark, but he packs so many ideas into a song without losing its central focus and at the same time giving everything lots of space. Here and there a string section drops in and out, a flurry of baroque piano, soaring flutes, a jazzy organ swell, searing electric guitar, hints of electronic psychedelic washes. At times romantic and mysterious, other times more urgent with rhythms picking up and slowing down in tempo to evoke a wide range of emotive qualities. This is a record we'll probably be playing all summer long. We can't recommend it enough!
Class is now in session with the much anticipated vinyl reissue of Glenn Branca's seminal 1980 debut of post-modern no-wave composition, Lesson No.1. The first release on legendary New York label 99 Records (who also introduced Liquid Liquid and ESG to the world), Lesson No.1 combined the New York school of minimalist composition (Terry Riley and La Monte Young) with the burgeoning ferocity of dissonance and feedback prevalent in no-wave and punk of the time (Sonic Youth, Theoretical Girls, and The Static). While Branca was not the first to combine modern composition and rock tropes, or lead bands with multiple guitarists (Rhys Chatham was doing that first, though his Guitar Trio recording was released much later), Branca's compositions tended to wield much more sonic power and hefty brutal dynamics than Chatham, leaning more toward heavy ear-shattering club performances at CBGB's than respectful art-spaces like The Kitchen.
This reissue includes an extra one-sided 12" of the 16 minute bonus track, "Bad Smells", originally on a John Giorno compilation, Who Are you Staring At? which was commissioned for a Twyla Tharp dance piece. It also features the guitar work of Thurston Moore and Lee Ranaldo who played in many of Branca's performing bands before forming Sonic Youth. You can hear the churning origins of Sonic Youth's trademark chiming dissonance in every one of Glenn Branca's early big bang epics. Essential!
It's hard to believe it's been six years since Title TK, the Deal sisters last "comeback" effort that polarized longtime fans into either defenders or dissenters. The unpolished production and sometimes awkwardly strung out delivery of that record left many people cold at the time. Yet as time moved on, more and more folks have warmed up to its rough sheen (or at least they are now admitting it!). There's always an air of dubious speculation and scrutiny around a Breeders release that you don't find with, say a new Black Francis album. Perhaps it's due to their scant discography (only 4 records in 18 years, 5 if you include the one-off Breeders-in-drag side project, The Amps), rotating line-ups, problematic drug habits, or the hopeful but unlikely chance that they'll outshine their 13-year-old breakout hit, "Cannonball". (They don't btw, but really they've long moved on, can't we?)
So here we are with a brand new Breeders album, the best work they've done in ages, but one with scars still on full display. Using the same line-up as Title TK, the arrangements are still raw but with a richer envelope of production around the edges (especially with the vocals) that harkens back to their classic sound. There are plenty of driving rock numbers, "Overglazed, "Bang On" ,"Walk It Off", tempered with softer, majestic tracks, such as "Night of Joy", and "We're Gonna Rise". At the same time, they attempt to break new ground with various song forms, not all of which are equally successful. The Eastern trance atmosphere of "Istanbul" is stunning, but the Kelly-sung Spanish ballad, "Regalam Esta Noche" delves a bit too far into Linda Ronstadt territory for us. Overall, it's a great record but one with flaws. The first half of the record is nearly perfect, but stumbles through the second half where the flow is weakened by too many meandering changes from slow numbers to faster ones. The biggest weakness being the last song, which also happens to be the title track, trailing off into a long whimper without a definable ending, when they had much stronger songs to end with. But it's really not that the songs themselves are bad, they aren't. It's just that the order of the songs adversely reveal their faults instead of highlighting their strengths. We recommend listening to this on shuffle for best overall effect. Still, a new Breeders record is always welcome, and we'll listen to it to death because they'll always have those songs that make us achingly happy, even if we can't help picking them apart. Because when it comes down to it, we'd rather listen to the worst Breeders record than the best Black Francis record any day (although his new record might have us rethinking that)!
Brethren indeed. This is the work of two consummate stringed instrument manipulators working in the improvised avant-folk idiom... Brother #1, from England, AQ fave James Blackshaw (who just blew us away with an amazing solo instore performance two weeks ago!), a dexterous master of the 12 string guitar. Brother #2, from Belgium, Renaissance lute player Jozef Van Wissem (who was also recently scheduled for an AQ instore alongside his pal Tetuzi Akiyama but unfortunately had to cancel due to a bad cold or flu). Van Wissem has received acclaim from us and others for his solo recordings incorporating electronics and field recordings alongside his innovations on classical lute improvisation.
Together, it's a perfect pairing, Blackshaw and Van Wissem conjuring a delicately dense intertwining of forward-flowing fingerpicked minimalist melodies... stately spiritual praises that are all instrumental but for a brief Current 93ish spoken coda to track one, "...The Lifting Of The Veil". And track three, "How The Unencumbered Soul Advises That One Not Refuse The Calls Of A Good Spirit", is more of an electrically-charged, expansive soundscape of moody string-strike. Electronics, "tennis edits" (??) and the "feline vocals" of one Bun Bun are also woven into the mix with Blackshaw's 12 string and Van Wissem's baroque lute.
To sum up: alchemical loveliness, utterly mesmeric! Really our only complaint about this is also a compliment: at just under a half hour total (28:39), we wish it were longer! The trance-like reveries this induces are too soon interrupted unless we set our cd player on repeat... (not an option with the super-limited vinyl version of this of course.) That's right, the lp version is LIMITED TO 330 COPIES. Whereas the cd is limited to a mere 1000. And we only have a few of the vinyl...
The hermetic concern with dualities, whether they be natural and spiritual, mysteries veiled and revealed, fertility and drought, or as the the title of this disc alludes to the religiously symbolic wolf and lamb, greatly inform this collaboration between avant-lutist Jozef Van Wissem and twelve-string wunderkind James Blackshaw. Named after a 13th century cult of Northern European heretics, this is the second installment for the duo, who give us four more pieces to mirror the four from the first installment. Where on their debut disc we felt the sonic fullness of Blackshaw's cascading twelve string repetitions and on one track Van Wissem's progressive use of distorted electronics, on this new album, the sound is more ascetically restrained, favoring Van Wissem's use of reconfigured medieval and classical renaissance compositions into spiraling but lyrically melodic motifs in which Blackshaw adds interlocking labyrinthian figures in DADEAD tuning. This is sacred music for mad monks!
When we first saw this, we were excited that perhaps more lost recordings of UK folk singer Anne Briggs had been discovered, but this is actually the first vinyl release of Sing A Song For You, Briggs' final recording from 1973 that wasn't properly released until 1996 on The Fledg'ling label. Why this has a new title and new artwork is curious, but the record's liner notes give some insight to the singer's ambivalence about this recording and why she retired at such an early age. She was pregnant with her second child at the time and wasn't satisfied with the quality of her singing. Plus playing the bouzouki with its convex back against her pregnant belly was difficult! When the original photo session for the album cover didn't work out and she was asked to do it again while she was preparing for a move to Scotland, it pretty much sealed the final rejection of the project. She finally allowed it to be reissued in 1996 and now we have the 180 gram vinyl version with much better artwork than the cd! As much as we love Anne Briggs, we never paid much attention to that cd, thinking it was older recordings of more traditional material, never really knowing the back-story. But after listening to this, we were wrong to dismiss it! It's definitely a continuation of the much fuller sound from her last officially released record, The Time Has Come. Ten songs here, half she wrote, half traditional interpretations played mostly with Ragged Robin as the back-up band, the only time she has ever worked with a full band, and it really sounds amazing, like a true lost folk record should!
