Finally this British Folk classic becomes both widely available and affordable! In a lot of ways Anne Briggs is the British equivalent of Karen Dalton, both were distinctive and influential interpreters of traditional folk songs, and both adamantly hated recording. While Briggs' fate is less tragic than Dalton's, her self-imposed retirement from singing at 27 and long willful reclusion has left fans with a similarly slim catalog of recordings to pore over. Yet Briggs is no obscure figure. Discovered by Ewan MacColl in the early sixties, Brigg's pure yet untutored vocal delivery had tremendous influence on many of the key figures of the British folk revival, namely, Sandy Denny, Maddy Prior, June Tabor and Linda Thompson. By the time of her retirement, she was legendary. The Time Has Come is her second (and in our opinion, best) album, originally released in 1971. Here for the first time she records some of her own songs, a few of them popularized by other artists, like the title track previously covered by her former boyfriend, Bert Jansch. But perhaps influenced by the emergence of rock elements in the folk scene, she also updates the arrangements of her guitar and bouzouki accompaniments so that even the traditional tracks are handled with a warm but modernly melancholic pastoral grace. An artist at what now has to stand as her peak. Perfect for Spring!
Ok so this record doesn't officially come out until June but because they have already launched their tour, Matador has let a few copies out into the world and we were lucky enough to get our hands on this early batch. With its custom packaging which includes amazing "tripping" rainbow glasses that you can wear and see stars and colors all summer long, this is a record you are gonna want to get your hands on as soon as you can. You often hear people talking about a record that has warmth. But you don't always really melt in that supposed warmth. With their new full length and first outing for Matador. Brightblack Morning Light (we think they might slightly change their name on everything they put out) have made a record that makes you melt in all the best possible ways. With the morning light added to their moniker, Brightblack have made one of the most perfect morning records we've heard in ages. This is the kind of record you put on right when you get up, sun is shining through the windows, slight breeze caressing your neck as Brightblack's Rabob and Nabob let their laid back, trance inducing southern charm seep deep into your pores. There is an overall ambiance to this recording that allows their soothing vocals and rich instrumentation to come together so perfectly as one. You can hear the influence of South American psychedelia, all warm and seductive, you can also hear bits of Americana transmitted with all the right haze and glaze. This is THE summer record, to serenade you as you while away the long warm days in bed all summer long. Highly recommended!
It's been two long years since Broadcast singer Trish Keegan's tragic untimely passing, and we're finally getting to hear some of the material the band was working on before she died. There have long been rumors of a posthumous Broadcast record proper to someday be released, but until that album is ready, we have this soundtrack to a British psychological thriller called Berberian Sound Studio to keep us company. Unlike Broadcast's previous album with the Focus Group, Investigate Witch Cults Of The Radio Age, which played like an imaginary soundtrack for the most incredible horror movie never made, Berberian Sound Studio comes across like a proper soundtrack that follows a visual plot, with repeating themes in various moods that are lilting, atmospheric and tense, but also including creepy foley sound effects of bloodcurdling screams, sinister prayers, as well as short haunting library music cues. The film, about a British sound engineer's devolving mental state while working on a giallo-like exploitation film in the mid '70s at Italy's famed Berberian Sound Studio, harkens back to the days of heralded Italian movie composers Ennio Morricone and Bruno Nicolai working on films by Dario Argento and Lucio Fulci. Originally conceived as the soundtrack for the film within the film, called The Equestrian Vortex, director Peter Strickland soon decided to use Broadcast's music cues to underscore what was happening outside of the interior film as well, so that there is a lovely blurring of reality and fantasy, intensified by the various sonic cues included from the film that overall make this soundtrack stand up on its own. Of course adding to the haunting quality of the music is the ghostly but minimal presence of the late Keegan's voice, that appears mostly in near background like famed Morricone singer, Edda Dell'Orso, in lilting sing-song and wordless choruses. The question remains unanswered if that is her voice heard praying or screaming.
Coincidentally, we've recently become obsessed with a similar sounding soundtrack by Polish composer Andrzej Korzynski for the eighties cult horror film, Possession (something, we are hopefully going to be able to list one of these days!) and the two have been interweaving a strange musically cinematic and terrifying spell throughout the store. Highly Recommended!
At last, the highly anticipated follow-up to The Noise People Make has arrived!
Cup totally adored their pre-album Pendulum cdep, and after giving the HaHa Sound a first listen she feared that this sophomore effort's brightest highlights might've been packed onto that lil' ep. For instance, the ep's title track bursts forth as the second song on the album and is clearly one of its standouts. It's undeniably irresistible! Thoroughly taken with that song as well as the gloriously obtuse, bloopy electronic instrumentals, she initially found herself somewhat disoriented with the rest that followed (as you might be able to tell 'cause she's speaking about it in the third person), but then she gave it a second spin... and the album blossomed before her very eyes/ears!
Vocalist Trish Keenan murmurs and sings in her wistful, lullaby-perfect voice that nears the clarity and sweetness of Karen Carpenter or Julee Cruise. It's the perfect foil for the fizzing and churning backdrop of analog synths, guitars, bass and percussion created by Roj Stevens, Tim Felton, James Cargill and Steve Perkins - tipping their collective hat to '60s Brill Building girl groups, the grand sentimental lovey-dovey-ness of Bacharach, and Esquivelian space age bachelor pads everywhere. Broadcast skillfully craft glistening, starry-eyed music that swirls and creaks like an old carousel, but just as ably veer off into more eccentric, trippy territory a la Bruce Haack, Raymond Scott and Joe Meek (psst, this contrast is perfectly exemplified at the meeting between songs 7 and 8 - "Lunch Hour Pops" and "Black Umbrellas" - check 'em out!). Perhaps the time has come that the occlusive "Stereolab Jr." tag they've been saddled with (granted, quite aptly so) may be tossed in the trash. Very recommended!
Ooooh soooo gooood! As seems to be the case with each new Broadcast album, a couple of listens is all it takes to get Tender Buttons hooks into ya! The effects of Broadcast's pop intoxicants aren't as immediate nor as obvious here as those of 2003's The HaHa Sound, but they're no less potent. Broadcast continue to melt their sound into the ultra-pretty sounds of '60s girl groups. In doing so, they perfectly showcase lead vocalist Trish Keenan's unbelievably lovely vocals which occasionally take on a more somber tone here than they did on the airier HaHa Sound. Despite the undeniable sweetness of Keenan's voice, the band always gracefully sidestep excessive syrupiness with the counterbalance of heavier guitars, a propulsive groovy rhythm section and a broad spectrum of hefty analog synth melodies and textures. A luminous dreamboat with a tiger in its tank. Swoon!
An absolute delight from start to finish! Like a big ol' box of Crayolas, The Future Crayon is a collection of Broadcast rarities. The eighteen tracks are compiled from singles, eps, and compilations dating back to 1998. They effectively remind us that while this UK band is perhaps best known for their plush synth-driven pop, their musical spectrum stretches far beyond that into jazz, space age, exotica, krautrock, prog, and the science fair even! Needless to say, your ears will surely find that they're so much more delicious than those waxy coloring implements. They're more like the aural equivalent of a fifty scoop sundae -- towering in dream pop yumminess comprised of soft creamy sherbet (Trish Keenan vocals! sigh!), occasional bloops of marshmallow cream and hot fudge (their analog synthesizers!), a sprinkling of nuts and sugary bits (the snappy often jazzy percussion as well as those synths again!). It's all perfectly summed up in the cd's sixteenth and seventeenth numbers "Minus Two" and "Violent Playground", both taken from their 2003 EP Pendulum. Fantastic! Yes, recommended!
Yes! The Broadcast vinyl reissues are finally here and it can't be overstated how much we love this band and everything they ever released, especially since as a band they are no longer with us with singer Trish Keegan's untimely death in 2011. We won't go into our usual fan-gush prose and write paragraphs about how wonderful these albums are (we mean we can go on and on about them!) since we just got a handful of each one, apart from the first singles compilation, Work And Non-Work, which is already awaiting a repress. In fact all of these might be being repressed, we think they sold out on preorder, but we have a few, come in this weekend and try and grab 'em!
Over four full lengths and two single collections, Broadcast has traversed a dreamy retro-futurist sound that may have started from the same kaleidoscopic pop spark as bands like Stereolab and Pram, but has since become something fully their own. We will eventually relist all of them as soon as we get enough copies to list.
Broadcast's debut full length, The Noise Made By People, released in conjunction with Tommy Boy back in 2000, was a dark and cinematically dreamy departure only hinted at from the early singles. Early and lazy mis-characterizations of the band just being another Stereolab copy (which we might have though ourselves), couldn't be farther from the truth. Keegan's thoughtful and psychically focussed lyrics and delivery were a far cry from Sterolab's vocals as rhythm instrument approach. Instead, typified by the opener "Long Was The Year" much of the sound was largely and selectively lifted from electric psychedelic bands from the '60s like United States of America and White Noise where ring modulators and synthesizers transport female voices into environments of psycho-acoustic dream states with an infectious pop moodiness. While their albums like Tender Buttons and The Ha Ha Sound have a more popular following and rightfully so since each album is its own particular gem, we believe their debut is equally potent, underrated and probably the best place to start for the uninitiated. Highest Recommendation!!
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
SORRY.
Broadcast's second full album finds the chanteuse led group with the unlikely home of Tommy Boy in the States. "Umbrellas of Cherbourg", Stereolab, The Free Design, and The Cardigans are still the jumping off points for Broadcast although they are finally moving away from their not entirely unwarranted branding as Stereolab Jr. But unlike their predecessors, Broadcast avoids big pop hook catchiness in favor of pleasantly dark and dreamy music for meandering 60s films about jetsetters spying and falling in love and vacationing on the French coast. You know.
Yes! The Broadcast vinyl reissues are finally here and it can't be overstated how much we love this band and everything they ever released, especially since sadly as a band they are no longer with us due to singer Trish Keegan's untimely death in 2011.
Work and Non-Work was the first introduction of the group to a larger audience, collecting their first two singles and an ep previously released on the labels Wurlitzer Jukebox and Stereolab's Duophonic imprint between 1995 and 1996. Their songcraft, which would be honed and evolve over their next four albums, arrived nearly fully formed, though they do wear their influences most outwardly on this collection than any other release. Staking a firm spot between Stereolab's retrofuturism and Portishead's emotively sonic trip-hop formalism, while also mining altered-consciousness music from the margins of sixties psychedelia, like United States of America, White Noise and Elephants Memory. In fact, "The World Backwards" is nearly a remake of Elephants Memory's "Old Man Willow", a song most famously heard in the druggy party scene in the movie Midnight Cowboy. But Broadcast never tried to hide their influences always exposing a narrow-trodden path for listeners to find little known treasures from the past. Leading the way for bands like Death and Vanilla, The Sound Carriers and Jane Weaver to carry the torch into the future. A perfect place to start for the uninitiated.
Crystal balls, dark mirrors, Ouija boards, seances, creepy knocking, music boxes that play themselves, creaking doors, and distorted kaleidoscopes are just a few of the fascinating hauntological associations mined in the latest collaborative effort by long time aQ faves, Broadcast, and new to us electronic outfit, The Focus Group, run by Ghost Box label head Julian House (who also designed all of Broadcast's record covers). We've been trying to carry the Ghost Box label stuff for years but haven't found a feasible distributor, and with this release, it has become quite clear what we've been missing out on.
Billed as a mini-album (23 tracks across 50 minutes), Broadcast and The Focus Group Investigate Witch Cults of The Radio Age is all at once a mesmerizing sound collage, a mind-warping concept album, a reimagined soundtrack to some chilling psychological cinema (we're thinking of films like Dead of Night, Secret Ceremony, The Ballad of Tam Lin, Persona, Angel, Angel Down We Go, or Simon, King of The Witches), as well as an homage to the obscure left-field psychedelic electronic music and sounds of the sixties and seventies that have influenced Broadcast over the years. Bands like White Noise, The Animated Egg, Basil Kirchin, United States of America, British Library Music and of course the BBC Radiophonic Workshop.
So as you probably guessed from the description above, this is not a typical Broadcast release, but a experimental detour while we await for their next official full length. Fans of their full lengths may be less immediately satisfied by this, as it's not designed to be enjoyed as a pop record. It often requires either deep listening, or having it on while working on a solitary activity, such as painting or knitting, or better yet tarot card reading. While Trish Keenan's lush and dreamy singing is heard through out, there is only one typical Broadcast song, opener "The Be Colony", a woozy lullaby that hearkens back to the dreamy melodies from the HaHa Sound album, and even that is thrown in the delirious blender of The Focus Group, who took recordings made by Broadcast for this project and cut them up in a method to suggest automatic writing under a deep hypnosis. Disembodied voices, blowing wind, flashes of jazz drumming, eerie squeeches and electronic bloops, radio dials shifting, whining puppies, crows cawing, mysterious choirs and echo-y playground rhymes. Very ghostly, and sometimes beautifully creepy. It's the kind of strategy that may sound like it could get tedious after awhile, but the collage is so delicately and carefully constructed with just enough structured melodies that it wonderfully forms an intriguing narrative, of course aided by suggestive song titles like "Reception/ Group Therapy" , "Ritual/ Looking In", "Libra, The Mirror's Minor Self..." and "Drug Party". We think that people who are less inclined towards Broadcast's pop albums and into spectral sounds, occult music compilations, electric voice phenomenon, experimental electronic music or music on the Type or Miasmah labels should definitely give this a listen. We haven't been so spellbound by a record in quite a while. Fantastic!
We haven't listed too much Marion Brown before, save for an early ESP label release, though his name is often spoken of in the same revered tones as Albert Ayler, Don Cherry, and John Coltrane. We loved his playing on Harold Budd's Pavilion of Dreams, and he had famously played on Coltrane's Ascension (two very opposite sides of the alto saxophone spectrum and really the only extremes of that instrument we dig) so we were very excited to get this latest entry in Impulse's "two-fer" cd reissue series to see what Marin Brown as a bandleader is all about, and this doesn't disappoint.
Brown, who died in 2010, was a more understated (and underrated!) player than his better known contemporaries, often marking his playing with noted hesitations and tentativeness that most jazz giants readily avoided. The influence of poetry, ethnomusicology and southern folk tropes also took him into stranger and less popular directions than most jazz at the time. Geechee Recollections and Sweet Earth Flying from 1973 and 1974 respectively, are the second and third installments in what is considered the "Georgia Trilogy" (the first installment, Afternoon of a Georgian Fawn, from 1970, was recorded for ECM), based on the tone poems of Georgia poet Jean Toomer and Brown's Georgian upbringing. Both records are largely built around suites of songs, with Geechee Recollections more horn based and Sweet Earth Flying largely based around piano and fender Rhodes compositions.
Geechee recollections starts with the loping bass groove of "Once Upon a Time (A Children's Tale)" propelled by ethnic percussive rhythms and energized alto sax playing. Toomer's poem "Karintha" is recited by Bill Hasson over an avant backdrop of intersecting violin, sax, kalimba chimes and other percussion. Passages of martial New Orleans style jazz open up into soft abstract spaces in the Tokalokaloka suite, that have a slow languid heat full of humid tropical associations. Mostly sheets of metallic percussion and tinkling bamboo surround Brown's intuitive and often introverted horn improvisations in fertile bursts of sound.
Sweet Earth Flying may be more satisfying for those looking for a deeper, more inviting, immersion. Focused on two suites, the title one, along with one called "Eleven Light City", "Sweet Earth Flying" begins with a soft and graceful solo on fender Rhodes before jumping full flight into a percussive free jazz excursion. Part 4 of that suite features a swirling recitation by Bill Hasson of an invented hybrid language drawn from a variety of Latin, Afro-Caribbean and regional American vocabularies. "Eleven Light City" has a more late-night low-key feel, slightly noirish, but not foreboding. It has a spacious genteel quality that belies its more muscular undertones. But the chief beauty of this record is the genius pairing of Muhal Richard Abrams and Paul Bley on acoustic and electric piano that make this a truly exciting listen.
This is the first time both records have been released on cd, and it's about time! So good!
Forget about the Pop Ambient series, and other modern dreamy music makers, when it comes to simply stunning, calming and beautiful sounds it just doesn't get better then Harold Budd. Now 75 years old, and showing no signs of losing his immaculate touch, In The Mist is quickly becoming one of our favorite Budd records ever. This is how we like his music the best, just Budd and a piano, so stripped down and minimal, yet able to conjure up such a majestic and otherworldly soundworld. Slowly drifting and gliding with an ease and emotional warmth that allows you to tune out the noise of the outside world and return to a place of peaceful surrender. What makes Budd's music so special is that in any other hands the sounds would just be pleasant but not much more, but Budd has this amazing knack for masterful phrasing that injects soft melancholy and real bliss into his compositions.
It makes such great sense that in so many ways Harold Budd is an artist's music maker. We know so many great visual artists who play Budd's music in their studio as it really does give you a clean slate to work from, erasing the clutter and annoyances of everyday life and softly guiding you into places that are filled with spirit and soul. Beyond beautiful!
For a label inspired in spirit by Brian Eno's legendary Obscure imprint, we bet once-local label Root Strata was super psyched to be able to release a Harold Budd recording, especially one so incredibly beautiful. Perhaps is a live 2006 recording performed at Cal Arts on the occasion of the memorial of former academic colleague, composer and friend James Tenney. This 75 minute completely improvised piece is Budd at his most moving and restrained. Inspired by a kind of oblique instruction or aphorism given to Budd by Tenney in the seventies, that suggested something "very long, nearly white", Budd creates elegiac clusters of melodic fragments and stretches them out letting long notes decay and drift, never seeming to repeat himself. Only previously available digitally, this is the first time Perhaps has been released in a physical format and comes with absolutely the highest recommendation!!!!
Daptone's The Budos Band has always been pretty fantastic, kicking out the killer instrumental '70s style Afro-Soul-Funk jams, super tight and groovy and quite authentic-sounding (even though they're from, like, modern-day NYC). We've dug all three of the ensemble's previous albums, but Burnt Offering (pointedly not titled Budos Band IV, even though it follows II and III) might be their best one yet. First, it's got some cool artwork of a Gandalf-lookin' wizard on the cover, a total stoner/psych image that looks like it should be on a Sleep album (or the side of a van). That art might clue you in that The Budos Band has been goin' through some changes... well, what's happened is that they've seriously heavied up their sound, the guitar parts are fuzzier and riffier, supposedly inspired by '70s heavy psych and proto-metal, like Black Sabbath and Pentagram!! They're still quite funky, though, so it's not a total extreme metamorphosis into doom metal or anything. We had kind of figured that meant this would sound like '70s Zambian garage-fuzzsters the Ngozi Family or Witch, but no, not exactly, 'cause what with their big horn section, they still sound like, well, themselves, but just with an additional edge of fuzzy, gritty guitar. Along with the hard-hitting rhythms, and spirited, darkly soulful brass, it's pretty darn cool. Think Fela Kuti gone super heavy psych, with a dark Ethiopiques vibe. Also, this new Budos Band sound reminds us of that awesome Italian 'library music' reissue by Blue Phantom, just a bit. Oh, and we halfway wonder if this transformation wasn't perhaps inspired by the success of Swedish Afro-fuzz voodoo psych sensations Goat?? Certainly Goat fans ought to dig this, too!! Super recommended.
Digipack cd, or gatefold vinyl w/ download.
There's never a question as to if a Budos Band release will sound good or not, they are one of THEE tightest and most masterful players of Afro-soul-funk around. And while their first two outings were totally great records, they have stepped up their game big time for number three. It's one thing to be talented musicians, it's another to create songs that have a really strong mood and presence, and that's exactly what Budos Band have done on III. It's a bit darker, wider in scope and just straight up ON FIRE! They've figured out how to take their inspiration from the music of Fela Kuti, James Brown, Sun Ra, Funkadelic, as well as hints of psychedelia from Turkey, Latin America and Africa, and bring it all together in such an infectious and surprisingly original sound. If you ever get a chance to see them live, go for it, cuz they always kill, and this new album is our favorite from them yet!
Nearly 10 years after her long-awaited return to recording in 2005, Vashti Bunyan is back with what is reported to be her final recording. To be expected, It's a delicate uber-gentle and pastoral affair with highly personal songs about life and family. Her soft dulcet voice creating beautiful folk lullabies that are lovely and oh so sweet, marked by warm atmospherics and lilting waves of sound. A longtime influential figure of British folk, Bunyan's quietude may not initially bowl you over, and indeed Heartleap is nearly the antithesis of the weathered pain of the other newly revived folk legend on this list, Alice Gerrard. But Bunyan's music has a way of sticking with you subtly over time and its long relaxed gaze into an unfettered way of life and beauty can be delightfully spellbinding and magical.
Also this is perfect for hip parents looking for music to play around newborns and young children (ahem, Allan!).
Like the title suggests, this is the cd version of Burial's last two 12"s. 6 tracks, almost an hour long, complete with obi 'cause it's a Japanese import. Both 12"s are pretty much out of print, so if you missed them, you gotta get this!
Street Halo was the first new music we had heard from Burial in 4+ years, and hardly needed a review at all (then or now), needless to say, the master of dark moody soul inflected minimal dubstep does it again, just check out the murky melancholy "Street Halo", which ditches some of the more overt dubsteppiness of past records, for something a bit more techno flecked, the beat a muted four on the floor pulse, while the surrounding sounds remain appropriately washed out and dreamlike, some spectral soulful female vox just add to the vibe. We actually spun the vinyl version of this at 33 the first few times, and holy shit, not sure if it's just us, but might sound even better that way, syrupy and witch house-y, total slomo cough syrup blackened dub electro drag. Too bad you can't easily slow down a cd, but even at the right speed of 45, it's pretty dang perfect, only a slight swerve from the dubbed out soul of Untrue.
"NYC" slows things way down, lacing some electro skitter and shuffling techno with a seriously dubbed out production and some sped up soul samples, still spare and skeletal, wreathed in a late night, winding down, chill out haze. And finally "Stolen Dog" is a dubby downtempo electro soul ballad, with a super hooky main melody, warm swirling low end swells, a skittery beat buried in the mix, and still more vocal soul. So good!
Beautifully sad and heavy, "Kindred" is laid out like a dystopic symphonic requiem that morphs through a slow-motion roughshodden landscape. Lonely remote vocals spliced and polished into barely discernible words pitter-patter over record crackle, and far-off doomy atmospheres as clanging minimal garage rhythms propel forward and then drop out at irregular intervals. "Loner" steps it up with arpeggiated synths and an anxious pace with a cinematic car chase theme feel and RnB-ish vocal shadows buried underneath a layer of sonic grit and asphalt that freefalls into a strange haunted ambiance. "Ashtray Wasp" show a bit more light and hope at first. The vocals culled from cell phone recordings give a broader sense of actual song structure with sped up minimalist Phillip Glass-like orchestrations wrapping the song in a dramatically understated fury, eventually disintegrating into an extended oceanic womb of crackling unease. The final salvo turning into a lyrical filigree of piano, cascading vocal swatches and waves of radio static that fades like the night into the stratosphere. Chilling!
If The Boredoms and The Singers Unlimited somehow managed to work out a repertoire of Moondog covers, it may sound something close to this. Or perhaps more accurately, imagine if Juana Molina and OOIOO married folk electronics to a heavy percussive tumult in dizzyingly ecstatic chirping odes to the eccentric avant-street classicist. However you swing it, this is great! Cabaret Contemporain are a modern French quintet who have brought an electro-rock performative approach to the avant aesthetics of 20th century maverick compositions of John Cage, Terry Riley, and notably on this release, Moondog. Enlisting Swedish vocalists Isabel Sorling and Linda Olah, the pair charge the material with rapid-fire vocal acrobatics that add another layer of interwoven rhythm and texture to the plucked strings, sputtering electronics and crashing symbols that all together give the music such amazing energy. Includes the master's most endearing songs, "Enough About Human Rights" and "All Is Loneliness". If you have never heard Moondog before, we'd recommend you check out Viking of Sixth Ave. first. But for fans, this is some brilliantly crazy interpretation!
We've been working backwards in the Roberto Cacciapaglia catalog. We started with the eccentric pop of The Ann Steel Record from 1979, then a few lists back moved on to his minimalist systems composed piece, Sei Note In Logica. We'd planned on reviewing his first record, 1975's Sonanze, when Wah Wah originally reissued it, but are glad we waited for this Mupymup version which contains a bonus disc of 15 extra pieces from the period which really detail the beautiful range of this experimental classical composer with both Italian prog and Krautrock ties, and this will most definitely appeal to fans of either genre.
Sonanze is perhaps the most classical leaning release of the bunch, but it definitely has a deep kosmiche feel. Its 10 movements begin with cascading gongs filtered through tape loops against an airy atmosphere of piano runs. Chamber string dramatics lay out the definitive feel of the entire piece of plaintive horns and kettle drums before getting full on cosmic in the Second Movement with pulsating synths and deep phased chanting leading to a percolating soundscape of jaw harp vibrations and swelling strings. The third movement brings in Lubomyr Melnyk-style piano cascades, while the fourth movement introduces a disembodied angelic choir, reminding us of Ligetti's "Lux Aeterna" from 2001: A Space Odyssey. The 5th movement brings in Peter Michael Hamel-style organ arpeggiations devolving into bowed gong scrapes. The 6th movement is very Michael Rother like, with cloudy gliding guitar and on and on it goes, a different feel or instrument in each changing movement, but somehow tied into a deeply introspective and gorgeous whole. Mixed by legendary krautrock producer Rolf-Kaiser Ulrich (Tangerine Dream, Klaus Schulze, Ash Ra Tempel), Sonanze is definitely our favorite of the three releases we reviewed thus far (though the Ann Steel scores major points because it's so dang out there!).
The bonus disc is also pretty killer, filled with cosmic new age compositions of Moog and piano, filled with wonderful vocal experiments (check out the proto-Grouper track, "Manuela"), gongs and some abstract soundscapes to boot. So totally recommended and these reissues don't stick around long, so get it while you can!
It took a while for us to be able to list these - first our supplier ran out, then we got copies that were damaged, but now we've got more and we're glad to be able to review it, 'cause few records in recent memory have brought us as much unbridled joy as this one. We've heard inklings here and there about this record over the years and when we heard it was being reissued several months ago, our excitement grew with each new report. Straddling the lines between post-disco and new wave electronica without quite being either, The Ann Steel Album from 1979 is the product of avant-classical composer Roberto Cacciapaglia, a multi-instrumentalist that performed on Franco Battiato's Pollution (a unanimous aQ favorite!) and who is mostly known for composing works of progressive classical minimalism (Wah Wah recently reissued his debut Sonanze from 1975, and Sei Note in Logica from the same year as this, is also worth seeking out). But The Ann Steel Album is an entirely different animal, not only because of its skewed electronic dance-pop leanings, but because it features the beautifully strange and charming vocal presence of American model Ann Steel, who obviously is the real star of this record. She sings like a warm bodied android in clipped chirps and strange phrasings like a machine with english language programming for public interaction. Think Siri with a higher register. In the awesome opening song, "My Time", she's ready to sell you on the artificial wonders of modern society, where consciousness is akin to commodification: "My Life runs smooth like a highway / Billboards show me the way" (Belgian synth trio, Telex covered this in a smoother, more well known version on their debut a year later). Every song on here fully rejoices in the positive joys of the synthetic present, making this an infectiously grooving pop art statement with any trace of irony fully camouflaged under layers of glossy surface. It's easy to tell that retro-futurist bands like Stereolab and Sweden's Komeda were influenced heavily by this record, and it fits right in with the brilliant like-minded eccentric synthesis of Bruce Haack and Giorgio Moroder. Not sold yet? Go here to see an awesome clip from Italian dance show, Tilt, from 1980 and just try and remain unconvinced that this is awesome!: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tu2ESLpe-rE
Thank you Half-Machine for bringing this record back to life! Might just be reissue of the year! And apologies to you non-vinyl folks as this looks like for the present to be vinyl only.
More music needs to be like this! Open and unfettered yet baroquely mysterious and cryptic; taking strange careening detours that cast endlessly distorting sonic reflections. Minimal but complex, driving and repetitive, yet sloppily unraveling with a ponderous noisy pop undercurrent that is both reverent and perverse. Is this a rock record led by a chamber ensemble? Or an avant-garde composition ambushed by lurching bass and drums? Or both? Makes sense that this album is called Church of Anthrax and both of its high priests are one time Velvet Underground and Dream Syndicate members John Cale and the guru of minimalism Terry Riley.
This one time collaboration from 1971 has just been re-issued and it's never sounded better! Touching on experimental jazz, minimalist composition, free rock and baroque pop yet remaining elusive and restless, never settling neatly into any one genre. It was recorded at a time when such cross-pollination of sounds was not only new but very necessary. John Cale plays all sides of his musical personae returning to his avant-garde roots with LaMonte Young in the Theater of Eternal Music but infusing it with the noisy economy of The Velvet Underground and the poetic pop of his subsequent output. While Terry Riley allows his more purist minimal aesthetic to become looser and emotive, paving the way towards his soundtrack works a few years later. Add to it the shambling drums of Bobby Columby from Blood Sweat and Tears (uncredited here) and the strange guest appearance of little known singer, Adam Miller (probably best known for the sesame street song, "We all Live in the Capital I") and what we have is this truly odd and hypnotically amazing document. Something that sounds more Germany than New York, like a collaboration between Can and Ralf and Florian of Kraftwerk or between Faust and Cluster. Or more contemporarily and unlikely, say between Wooden Shjips and Shogun Kunitoki with a guest vocal appearance by Thom Yorke of Radiohead!
The title track opens with a deep low multi-horned drone before the bass and drums kick into what begins to sound like a more driving version of The Kinks'"Powerman". But instead of going into a formal song structure, the riff repeats with Riley's pipe organ laying circular filigree riffs over the top, maintaining a constant lurch forward, and glassy saxophone stabs and atonal guitar rising from underneath creating an uneasy rhythm that slowly unravels into a propulsively droney stew. The air clears for the beautiful "Hall of Mirrors in The Palace of Versailles" with Cale on piano and Riley on solo saxophone trading off building and lilting riffs that rise and coalesce into shimmering tones. It's the moment that feels unique to each of them: the melodic minimalism of Cale's Dream syndicate days, and the all night time-delayed sax pieces of Riley's "Poppy Nogood and The Phantom Band". But with its mirror imagery and gorgeous repetitions, it feels wonderfully cinematic like a lost score for Alain Resnais' "Last Year at Marienbad". The next track, "The Soul of Patrick Lee" is perhaps the strangest because it's the only one with vocals, which wouldn't be unusual for John Cale as he wrote it and it sounds like him, but oddly he relegates the singing duties to his friend Adam Miller, an obscure singer-songwriter who wrote a Partridge Family tune and sang the above mentioned Sesame Street song. This track provides a breather of sorts, a short baroque folk ballad interlude between the other longform pieces, but it's like a haunting theme that adds to the mysterious soundtrack feel of the whole record. "Ides of March", the longest piece, features chugging piano riffs and skittering drums over a looped but drunkenly lopsided groove that wavers in and out of sync, building in a weird way where all the notes that seem off finally becoming locked in and right. Closing the record is the short "Protege" which ups the vampy piano riffs and Moe Tucker like drums before careening into a swift blast of noisy distortion. A sudden ending to this curious record that leaves us wanting more. Thankfully there's the repeat button!
Third album from experimental guitarist and synthesist Ken Camden, whose dreamy and drifting solo work is a such a departure in mood, rhythm and tone from his group work in monolithic mopegazers Implodes that we didn't know right away they were even connected.
It's taken some time to catch up, but where Implodes has drug us through the darkness (ever so willingly), Camden, through his unique attention to sonic detail, sends us floating slowly through the light. Using guitar, modular synths and voice processing, Camden delivers an ambient excursion through texture and mood, repetitive forms, chordal clusters and harmonic tonal shifts that are pensively alien, yet serene and ponderously resonant. Fans of library records, sci-fi soundtracks, and cerebral new age music will find lots to love here!
Next up in the latest series of remastered vinyl reissues of the greatest works (we haven't yet gotten to the slighty-less-great ones) of seminal krautrockers Can, is this, the sublime Future Days. We're told these reissues (Monster Movie, Soundtracks, Tago Mago, and now Future Days) boast better sound than some previous versions, but please note the sound samples we're providing come from another source (and, in general, you can't expect to judge sound quality from an mp3 on our website, of course, anyway). So, on to our write up from the last time we celebrated a reissue of Future Days:
This is Krautrock at its absolute dreamiest. Next to Ege Bamyasi, this is one of our most favorite Can albums. A regulation-size track, "Moonshake" is surrounded by three long ones to create a lush, lifting journey. Suzuki's vocals just merely whisper in and out of the scene as the percussion and organ work itself into a transfixed polyrhythmic atmosphere and becomes balanced again through use of some constant and pulsating bass. "Moonshake" is a Can-brand pop track, barely truly "pop-ish" but as much in that vein as they ever reached. Then the album ends in pure elegance and glory. Very, very recommended if you don't have it in your collection already (and maybe even if you do, and want the new vinyl pressing - after all, these Can records are the sort worth buying more than once, right?).
Soundtracks! Can's first album to feature Damo Suzuki on vocals. These are tracks from various indie films scored by them in 1970. Features the 14 minute, psych guitar-heavy "Mother Sky" and the beautiful Malcolm Mooney-sung jazz-lounge piece "She Brings The Rain", both all-time favorites of most Can fans. Let us just say that if you don't own this already, here's a good chance to buy, not only this reissue, but a whole bunch of the best early Can on cd. The reissues contain extra liner notes and candid photos. But unless you're totally obsessed with the band and are certain of your ability to appreciate the remastering note-for-note, there's not too much else about these that's too terribly special. If you've happy with your older copies, you'd probably do well to just keep them and sleep soundly at night knowing that by not buying these reissues, you're not missing too much. If however, you'd like to spread some holiday cheer, here's your chance to sprinkle the Can collection amongst those you love.
Plux Quba is a record that after the nearly 30 years of its existence remains impossible to categorize. It's almost as if it was an alien broadcast beamed in from another planet. Little is known about its creator, Nuno Canavarro, outside of his native Portugal, and its discovery is so unbelievably legendary and riddled with hearsay that it's easy to dismiss this as a probable hoax.
Recorded in 1988 and released on a private label, it was believed to be discovered in 1991 by Jim O'Rourke while traveling through Europe with Jan St. Werner (Microstoria, Mouse On Mars) and Carsten Schulz (C-Shultz and Hajsch). Liking what he heard, Rourke eventually started a label call Moikai in 1998 and the first release was Plux Quba remastered by Portuguese guitarist and composer Rafael Toral. That the sounds contained on Plux Quba would go on to heavily influence the sound of all three artists' later output (not to mention bearing a strong sonic resemblance to Aphex Twin's early ambient pieces, Boards of Canada's nostalgic filmstrip melodies, Prefuse 73's glitch-hop, and Christian Fennesz's sublime Endless Summer) is a bizarre case of cosmic synchronicity. Rumors that this was an elaborate prank by the three electronic artists have since been quelled by enough evidence of Canavarro's existence as an architectural student, a member of semi-popular Portuguese new wave bands, and his subsequent compositional work in Portuguese cinema.
Indeed, the 15 tracks (8 of which are untitled - many clock in just over a minute) of Plux Quba can be seen as a bridge between the electro-acoustic computer-processing works of Robert Ashley (1979's Automatic Writing) and David Behrman (1984's Leapday Night) on the Lovely music label, and the advent of laptop-based electronica of the nineties. Yet Plux Quba seems less aware than that, as if created in a total vacuum. Its mystery remains one of its key attractions.
I (Scott) was turned on to this by friend and Alps band-mate Jefre Cantu-Ledesma in the nineties when he dubbed it to cassette for me, after raving about it endlessly. At first, I didn't understand the appeal. It doesn't endear itself to the listener right away. Each track is its own micro-universe of texture and mood. The first bursts of high piercing squelches, random cluster tones, bell drones and squeals, come off as abrasive and abstract, appear than disappear. Its soft-volume minimal experiments are heightened by pauses of pregnant silence that are not easy on casual listeners. It's not until about five short tracks in that processed disembodied voices, bird-like chirps and chord washes begin to emote a tangible melancholy melody, and that's when Plux Quba begins to work its magic. It took so many concentrated listens to that tape before I was finally under its spell.
Made with electronics, melodica, and pre-recorded tapes of acoustic instruments such as harp, flute, bells, marimbas, organ, an out of tune toy piano, and accordion, the overall sound is augmented by whispered transmitted voices, abstracted squeals, glitchy computerized electronics, toy instruments, crying children, animal noises, Conet Project style shortwave babble, and off-kilter hand percussion. It's almost as if a computer was fed some primitive bedroom recordings performed by children and asked to mimic the results. The cover art with its childlike drawing and strange font layouts doesn't offer any clues either, unless one is versed in Portuguese perhaps. But even then, Plux Quba seems to be mining a territory where language is useless as an orienting factor, but trades on a highly prevalent universality of emotion. It remains a singular and beguiling artifact that won't appeal to everybody, but offers massive rewards to the curious, adventurous and patient.
A Year With 13 Moons is Cantu-Ledesma's first major release since his debut for Type, Love Is A Stream, back in 2010. Of course he has been busy in between those years, releasing limited tapes, cd-rs and split lps, touring and collaborating, co-running the Root Strata label and moving restlessly from San Francisco to Berlin, to Munich, back to San Francisco and finally settling (for the time being anyway) in Brooklyn. In many ways, A Year Of 13 Moons is the other side of the same coin of Love Is A Stream's glorious embrace of the shoegaze tidal waves of Flying Saucer Attack, Cocteau Twins and Lovesliescrushing. Sonically, they share a kinship. But where the first album appeared to be about the blossoming of new love and the changes it brings, this new one seems more about the dissolution of that love and the moving on from its aftermath; what disappears and what lingers.
Recorded during a residency at the Headlands Art Center he shared with filmmaker and visual collaborator, Paul Clipson, the first and longest track, "The Last Time I Saw Your Face" sets the tone with a slow-fading white-hot burst of solar distortion topped by a lilting electric melody that suggests the rushing in of a loving yet painful memory, but half-way through sputters, flickers and changes course in a way that the sound appears to move past you and gets farther away, leaving one adrift both aurally and physically. That trajectory of smoldering intensity, combining a soaring but battered angelic Cocteau Twins-ish guitar drift with the quasar-laden feedback void of magnetic static conveys us through the albums many peaks and valleys, which at times touch on the romantic melancholy of Durutti Column's pastoral guitar and drum machine as well as Main's ominous and sometimes airless ambience. It's a beautiful and heartfelt record, gorgeously realized but one that does not try to endear the listener to its many complex moods. In fact, its blown out acoustics seem designed to be played in big echoing halls as loud as they can. It's face-meltingly bittersweet. (Note: also on vinyl, but we're running low...)
Before we blather on like we so often do, it seemed like it might be good to just toss out a first impression of Love Is A Stream, the fantastic new record from Root Strata label Head Honcho Jefre Cantu-Ledesma, his first for the type label. And heck, that first impression might be all you need:
Lovesliescrushing meets Flying Saucer Attack.
There. Hard to argue with that. Warped warbly, blurred shoegazey drift, long stretches of incendiary psychedelic guitar drone, streaks of soft noise, buried melodies, ethereal vocals, lush layered textures, dense and explosive, expansive and dreamily hazy, and in its own way, gorgeously heavy.
A new side of Cantu-Ledesma for sure, whose past records seemed to hover in a much more tranquil serene otherworld, unfurling hushed landscapes of whispery minimalism, of delicate crystalline shimmer, and of barely there soft focus ambient drift. Love Is A Stream is anything but, a fiery, fierce, yet ultimately lush and washed out series of bold shoegaze dreamnoise experiments, not so much pop songs swathed in distortion and effects, as carefully crafted sonic impressions, a series of gorgeous miniature epics, each a brief expanse of prismatic hypnogogic psychedelia, every one a unique a roiling concoction of fuzzpopbliss and murky melodic churn. On the surface, the record plays out like a series of textures, from warm whirling hum, to crumbling blown out white noise blur, to grinding muted pulse and throb, to gauzy bleary haze, to thick billowy low end rumble, to superdistorted effects-drenched synthnoise, and yeah, you're reading right, this is in fact a noisy record, but it's an artfully crafted, carefully sculpted noise. A thick, billowing, warm and gloriously enveloping melodic noise, like sinking into a swirling sea of burnished muted crush, a nearly overwhelming avalanche of whirling swirling crumbling throb and thrum, beneath it all lurk delicate melodies, tendrils of minor key guitar, ghostly voices, whirring synths, they rise to the surface here and there, but for the most part exist as shadowy impressions, infusing the noisy textures with a melodic core, a warm glowing sonic heart, which is what transforms these heaving slabs of shoegazey heaviness into something divine, and divinely dreamy.
There are brief moments, where the surface noise, and the distortion, and the walls of effects peel back, and we get to peek behind the curtain, which reveals the lush minimal underpinnings of the songs, a brief melodic smear here, a hushed little fragment of guitar there, but a glimpse is all we get, and really all we want, because it's how those bits of minimal songcraft interact with the intense sonic effulgence that is truly the magic that Cantu-Ledesma wields in conjuring up the sounds here. And like all magic, the joy is not in how it was done, but it how it makes us feel.
The lp version comes with a bonus cd, a collaboration with Type label mainman Xela, who took source material provided by Cantu-Ledesma, and fashioned his own bit of ambient dronemusic. Nearly 50 minutes of haunting drift, after a short burst of caustic super distorted crunch, Xela settles into a slow burning sprawl of washed out chordal shimmer, deep rumbling thrum and lush streaks of shoegazey buzz, a few moments as dense and psychedelic as the record proper, but for the most part, more of a chill out wind down coda, the perfect addendum to an already practically perfect record. Really quite lovely.
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
SORRY.
Repressed and back in print.
Record number two from Leyland Kirby's Caretaker project, whose last record, Persistent Repetition Of Phrases, was a unanimous aQ fave, and was of course one of Wire magazine's top 10 albums of 2008, and was, and still is, one of our best sellers, and it looks like this one is likely to follow suit.
A sonic meditation on memory and loss, The Caretaker, takes old jazz records, various effects, and what sounds like a battery of old beat up Victrolas, and weaves Philip Jeck like soundscapes, but unlike Jeck, the source sounds here are not obfuscated, in fact, in some respects, The Caretaker records are almost like spectral spiritual otherworldly mix tapes, especially on this new one, which sounds like old 78s left to play in a big old auditorium, the room's reverb lovingly wreathing the music in a gauzy old timey haze, the surface noise, hiss and crackle and pop, somehow accentuated by the cavernous space. Better yet, replace the auditorium with an old abandoned mansion. Imagine the great room, animal heads on the walls, old oil paintings, a massive fireplace, charred black, old decaying rugs, all the furniture covered in white cloths, looking like ghosts, cobwebs in all the corners, the floor beneath a layer of dust, and in the corner, an old record player, lit up, its turntable spinning slowly, some old dusty record, to a room full of spirits, a sonic requiem for a time that once was, the music seeming to reflect the ever fading memories, and that's what these songs sound like, some sort of haunted house jazz, old timey seance blues, mournful melodies played on an old piano, muted trumpet, swoonsome strings, shuffling drums, a slow motion big band performing live in the ether, a spectral band playing lament after lament, dedicating it to their lost loves, and loves lost.
An Empty Bliss Beyond This World plays like some archival collection of lost 78's, but where the records' provenance is unknown, timeless music that could have come from anytime, and anywhere, the imperfections and inconsistencies as much a part of the sound as the music itself, all of that hiss and crackle a warm wreath of time-transformed-into-sound detritus, the passing of time mad physical, a sonic memorial to the past. So utterly gorgeous.
One of Wire magazine's records of 2008, the Caretaker's Persistent Repetition Of Phrases was in fact, when we finally got to hear it, incredible. Gorgeous, hazy, mysterious, destined to be one of OUR favorites as well. Unfortunately, when we tried to order it, intending to feature it prominently on the list, we discovered that it was in fact so limited that it was already out of print, not to be repressed. Argghhh.
Thankfully, the vinyl version showed up recently, so we grabbed as many as we could, so we could shower it with the praise it most definitely deserves. CD only folks are shit out of luck, but for now (and we mean NOW, these are crazy limited too) we have the vinyl, so grab one before they disappear.
The Caretaker has two modes, slow shimmery gauzy ambience, and slowed down warped and blurred big band and jazz. Often combing the two into some sort of otherworldly slow motion spectral dream jazz. We've been joking that the Caretaker is sort of like the DJ Screw of the avant underground, seeing as he takes scratchy old jazz records and reworks them Philip Jeck style into, woozy buried drifts of jazz shadows and haunting otherworldly vocals. Most of the jazzier tracks, sound like the soundtrack to some super creepy dream sequence, a la the Shining, like when Nicholson finds himself in that bar filled with ghosts, you can almost imagine, a dusty old saloon, broken mirrors, cigarette burned tables, sawdust floors, a lone figure sitting alone, hunched over in a dark corner, while all around him, nearly transparent figures move about as if still alive, a ballet of phantom familiarity, spirits unaware that they've moved on, going on with the machinations of daily life, their essence flickery and indistinct, like an old filmstrip. And a filmstrip soundtrack is exactly what the music of the Caretaker evokes, warm, effusive, burnished, old timey, antiquated, the sounds are dark and woozy and and bleed together, blurring into fuzzy stretches of lost memory, of suspended time. The music here is the sound of faded old photographs, of old super 8 movies projected on a wall in a dark and dusty old room, of abandoned skating rinks, of boarded up windows, of black clouds filling a slate grey sky, of life slowing to a crawl, before ven more slowly fading away. Absolutely and utterly breathtaking.
LIMITED TO 500 COPIES.
It's been 4 years since Dan Snaith's last record under the Caribou moniker, though he took a detour to record a techno-oriented album under a new moniker Daphni in 2012. Here on Our Love, he returns to form melding the Arthur Russell-ish dance floor excursions from his last outing, Swim, with some of the hazy pop bliss of older efforts Andorra and Milk of Human Kindness, into a slow disco candyland of blissfully moving synthforms, low-key soulful vocals and ear-wormy edits. Our Love may be his most fully realized record, its nuanced sound more polished and less experimentally pulled together from various approaches than previous efforts, marked by a noticeable restraint that keeps the tracks lean, but never lacking. In fact, it's got plenty of dynamic shifting movement and bounce, while retaining a deep emotional core in the songwriting. Admittedly, it took us awhile to get into this, mainly because we weren't sure that its attention to surface detail would penetrate deeper. But once we did we haven't stopped playing it.
aQ Hits is a new collection from beloved SF psychedelic space rock minimalists Carlton Melton, and is our second annual official aQuarius recOrds Record Store Day release. Last year's was a live disc called Black Valleys, a document of a killer aQuarius instore by NY psych rockers White Hills, and that one sold out in a flash. This year's looks to do the same - if you like White Hills, you like Carlton Melton, right?!
It's a super limited (just 300 copies) compact disc, collecting a handful of rare, and now out of print vinyl tracks, from various singles and split lps from the last couple years, including one super extended version.
Let's run through the various tracks... "Bottle Of Heat [Extended Version]", is, as you can probably tell from the title, the aforementioned alternate cut, which takes "Bottle Of Heat", originally released on the 2011 Agitated Records 12" comp I'm So Convoluted!, and offers up the unedited full-sprawl recording, stretching out to more than 19 minutes, thick smoldering clouds of soft focus psychedelia, drifting and blissed out, free form and abstract, a meandering epic of lush chordal swell and shimmery FX drenched swirl, all over a shuffling hypnotic and motorik kraut-psych beat. "Handling Snakes" is the A side from the group's Valley King 7" single, and is a jolt of heavy hypno-blues a la Wooden Shjips, but in the hands of Carlton Melton, somehow even heavier with wailing riffs and pummeling drums.
The next two tracks are from Carlton Melton's split 12" with Empty Shapes, originally released on Mid-To-Late Records in 2010: "Call and Response" is an epic (and originally nearly side-loooong) blowout, beginning with a heavy rumble of monolithic sludge eventually progressing into a slow wave of burnt-out blues riffage a la early Comets on Fire, that churns and steeps into a gnarly brew of molten fuzz. While "Purer", is more cosmic and dreamy, built on a layer of percolating synth drones that give way to a more uplifting space rock jam trajectory, total heart-of-the-sun zoner blissout.
And finally, the last two tracks are from CM's split 12" with Qumran Orphics, also originally released on Mid-To-Late Records, that one in the beginning of 2011. "March Of The Cicadas" is a glorious ten minute slab of psychedelic heaviness, that sounds exactly like the title implies, a slowmotion dirge over martial rhythms with buzzing electronic hisses and stratospheric guitar leads. And things finish off with "Murder Ridge", a noirish Bardo Pond-like spiral of burning sonic embers and sustained decay, a gorgeous hazy stretch of blurred lysergic drift, the perfect final movement, psych-drone comedown.
LIMITED TO 300 COPIES, each one hand numbered, the artwork is printed on metallic silver cardstock, everything housed in a slim dvd style case, only available here!
German progressive folk-psych with female vocals from 1978, originally a private press rarity now reissued on cd with some bonus live tracks (including a song called "Sweet Heroin", not too pastoral that).
Perhaps her best (and definitely most beloved) full length to date, Chan Marshall's fourth album shows a definite maturation of her voice. This is not to say that there's not a distinct charm to hearing her voice crack on every other song, however, she is far more confident in her ability to generate the sad harmonies of her songs. Heavy on the beautiful heartbreak. As a bonus, Jim White and Mick Turner (both of the Dirty Three) are Chan's backing band on this album. Be prepared to get all misty-eyed.
We don't do this often, but sometimes, the easiest thing is just to link to a YouTube video. Especially 'cause it's what got us interested in tracking down this reissue in the first place! Made us kind of obsessed, actually. You'll see/hear why if you go to http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QgGK4qBTwpw&ob=av2n, and check out the psychedelic video version of this album's title track. (For those who just want a quick idea, take a look at the album cover operating room scene, that's in the vid, complete with people dressed up in disturbing animal masks, a Rolls Royce driving through the desert, naked ladies in the jungle, and, well, just watch it...)
So, Jean-Marc Cerrone was/is a French dance music producer and badass drummer (elsewhere on YouTube you can see him live in concert, kicking out the massive drum solos). The more disco-savvy among us here had heard of him, he's up there with Giorgio Moroder in the Euro-Disco pantheon. And Supernature, from 1977, his 3rd album, is the jam. A disco-PROG masterpiece. The title track starts things off, the one that crazy video's for, and dominates, being almost ten minutes long in its album version. An epic. No ordinary club fare here, on the surface maybe, but the disco diva vocals (lyrics by Lene Lovich!) are about some dystopian sci-fi scenario wherein twisted science is turning men into monstrous beasts (which explains - sort of - some of the video's surreal imagery), these mutants rising up against their masters. Hauntingly, she sings lines like "how can I explain, things are different today, darkness all around, and no one makes a sound..." Woah, downer disco. It's pretty dark, and weird, and the thump thump thump of the music gets that way too, with some fat synth bass riffing at about the six minute mark that brings this into imaginary Magma doing disco territory, almost. Cerrone sure puts his state of the art ARP Odyssey Mk III to good use here. The track ends with hint of 2001's "Also Sprach Zarathustra", that's how epic this is. The rest of the side maintains the mood, "Supernature" segueing seamlessly into Cerrone's solo spot "Sweet Drums", his insistent beats heavily effected and spaced out, and that's followed by the more blissfully eerie electronics of "In The Smoke", which could be from a Goblin soundtrack.
Side two (tracks 4-6 on this cd), is the brighter side... More typical fusion-funked Euro-Disco anthems, all three songs with "Love" in the title ("Give Me Love", "Love Is Here", "Love Is The Answer"), great stuff though, top-knotch! Lush, lively dancefloor fodder for sure.
So, recommended to fans of Zombi, Goblin, Moroder, and the recently departed Donna Summer. This import reish, in one of those rounded-corner "Super Jewel Boxes", comes with extensively detailed liner notes in the cd booklet, illustrated in full color.
Vanity Records don't get much stranger or funkier than this one. We thought it odd that Trunk Records would put this out since it was originally recorded in 1980 in Anaheim, CA, far from Trunk's usual English oddity realm. But we're glad somebody finally released this, as we've been hearing about it for years, namely the unlikely stellar post-disco jam title track,"It's Broken". We say unlikely, because looking at the cover and pictures of Bob Chance singing and recording, it kind of reminds us of our '70s dad having a mid-life crisis moment and living his dream of being a real rock and roll musician, or something like that. And there are moments on this record that TOTALLY sound like that, like the opening blues rocker, "Brown Skinned Girl", but then things get even weirder. What starts out as an anachronistic take on sixties blues-folk pop a la Tim Rose and Tim Hardin, becomes a ten-minute funky slow disco excursion that fans of Giorgio Moroder and Cerrone will most definitely dig. Its long form hypnotic breaks and peaks are executed quite flawlessly. But then what to make of the stalker ode, "The Van Man", which not only makes light of mobile date-rape units, and the creeps who ride in them, but also sounds remarkably like some obscure Bollywood pop production. "I See Her" is a candy coated kaleidescopic folk-ballad, while "Colors" is more of a Herb Alpert cruise ship show tune reminding us of that Michael Farneti album, Good Morning Kisses. The final track, "Jungle-Talk" is a psychedelic instrumental Nino Nardini like Library groover full of exotic bird calls, congos and sultry temperatures. Quite the oddity, and yet totally infectious!
We were pleased and privileged to host minimalist composer Rhys Chatham for a signing last week while he was in town for his performance of A Secret Rose for 100 guitars at the Craneway Pavilion in Richmond. He was so nice, cheerful, and engaged (he signed Scott's vinyl copy of Factor X, his first release, and even offered to do his chart, as apparently astrology is one of Chatham's many passions!). Harmonie Du Soir is his latest release, and features two side long tracks. The cd has a 10 minute bonus track, "Drastic Classicism Revisited", which is also included with the digital download that comes with the vinyl. The first, title track begins with a piece for six electric guitars, bass and drums, the same arrangement as Die Donnergotter from 1986, and is a return to form, back to Chatham's early eighties minimalist deconstruction of rock music tropes where the composition seemingly glides along one chord structure yet the arrangement between instruments remains dynamically fluid. The second track/side, "The Dream Of Rhonabwy" is a twenty minute piece written for a seventy piece French brass band called Harmonie de Pontarlier, that is a moving and plaintive piece using slow martial rhythms and sustained tones with amazing flourishes to evoke a dreamlike textural tapestry of sound. So beautiful. Then, bonus cut "Drastic Classicism Revisited", like the title suggests, is a return to an early no-wave-ish whirlwind composition of sustained fast drumming and epic guitar squall. Fantastic!
We don't believe this is a new reissue, but it's one of our favorite jazz records ever, a real classic, and this is the first time we've been able to get a bunch to list. Perhaps it's even our most favorite Don Cherry album, which is saying a lot since there are so many of his records we love (this is the third we've made a Record of the Week) and there's been much spirited discussion around here between this one and Orient, a former record of the week from, egad, eight years ago! But hell, they're both really amazing so if you dug Orient, or the collaboration with Latif Khan we made Record of the Week a year ago, you'll definitely want to get this, and if you have no Don Cherry in your collection, you might as well start right here. Why we've never been able to list this before is a huge mystery, but let's just make up for lost time and tell you why this is so great.
Released in 1975 on the A&M label, Brown Rice is just 4 songs clocking at about 39 minutes. It's as focussed as Orient was sprawling, mining the same African, Indian, and Arabic influences, but in much tighter and dynamic, almost rock-oriented arrangements. Penetratingly deep on a spiritual level but also engaging and propulsive in its accessibility, Brown Rice is a record that gets right to the point the second the opening electric piano riff and female wordless singing of the title track begin. With wah'd out guitars and electric bongos building up into a groove, this is Cherry at his funkiest with ghostly trumpet shrieks off in the background, vocalised rhythm syncopations and Charlie Haden's underscoring bass swirling around Cherry's whispered chanting. "Malkauns", the longest track at 14 minutes lays down a lackadaisical vibe with tamboura and bass slowly unfolding a wide ground for Cherry's plaintive trumpet to eventually arrive and build up momentum with Billy Higgins' drumming pushing the proceedings upward and outward, eventually floating down back to earth. The third track "Chenrezig" begins deep and solemn with bass rumbles, chimes and Cherry's low and shaman-like vocals sometimes delving into Tuvan throat level buzz and whispering, augmented by high piano tones and lilting trumpet trills before the energy unleashes, not so much in a blind fury as it is a concentrated and feverish ritual extraction of sound. The final track, "Degi-Degi" brings us back to the driving rhythms and grooves of "Brown Rice", with Cherry's whispered chants and some of his brightest and most lyrical trumpet playing really feeling the space.
We can't help but wonder how much of Cherry's soundtrack work for the film Holy Mountain had an influence on his direction for this record, as Brown Rice is that rare hybrid of jazz, rock and film score, one we could easily see visualized on film. In the same line as Bitches Brew, Herbie Hancock's Sextant, or the recent Love Cry Want reissue, but also with the same sort of deep spiritual core we treasure so much in records by Alice Coltrane, Pharoah Sanders and Sun Ra. Essential!
A beautifully extensive live piece of long form minimalism from one of its most beguiling practitioners, Catherine Christer Hennix (remember The Electric Harpsichord?). Recorded at The Grimm Museum in Berlin in 2011, "Blues Dhikr Al-Salam (Blues Al Maqam)" is a 49 minute piece for voice, brass, computer and live electronics performed by Hennix and the newly formed electronic ensemble, Chora(s)san Time-Court Mirage, which includes aQ favorite dronologist Michael Northam on "time-mirage delay" and as the sound engineer. Originally commissioned for La Monte Young's 70th Birthday in 2005 as an 'infinitary' computer sound/animation environment, this is the first live recording of this piece. Modulating raga drones shift in an array of harmonic frequencies aided by layers of deep plaintive horns and processed vocals. There is a deep Tibetan Buddhist philosophy that flows throughout all of Hennix's work and in which she details in rather high-minded language inside this package, which would be difficult to paraphrase here, but the writing's closing line may sum up this piece nicely: "One of the Thousand sounds of Om."
Get out the tinfoil, draw the blinds, turn the television to static and brace yourself for the amphetamine-fueled paranoid mind-fuck of San Francisco's industrial wastoids, Chrome!
Their three seminal albums from the late seventies/early eighties, Alien Soundtracks, Half Machine Lip Moves, and 3rd From The Sun have thankfully been re-issued by the Noiseville label who have brought us stellar releases from Skullflower and Wicked King Wicker among others. Led by Damon Edge and Helios Creed, Chrome channeled The Stooges raw garage energy with Hawkwind's mindmelting space rock acid-psych and the electronic proto-art-punk of bands like Debris' and The Styrenes into a spazzy amalgam of sci-fi distortion, glam-punk chaos, and all manner of machine fuckery including television samples, bizarre tape manipulations and random fuzz-filled noise. Inspired by the future-shock visionary writings of J.G Ballard and Philip K. Dick, Chrome were cyber-punk before the term had even been popularized! In fact, they were one of those bands who became much more popular after their demise, when bands like The Butthole Surfers, Big Black and other Touch and Go bands started gaining notoriety in the mid-eighties college rock scene.
Half Machine Lips Move was the 1979 follow-up to Alien Soundtracks and it's definitely our favorite! The songwriting is completely fucked, with aggressively manic jump-cuts in and between songs. Sounding like the music analog machines would make if they just became sentient drug-taking monsters, the paranoid mind-control trip is full throttle, with nightmarish conspiratorial songs about the government and the media in cahoots with aliens to enslave the public ("TV As Eyes" "Zombie Warfare" and "You've Been Duplicated"). Rife with layers of sinister lo-fi electronic noises and television samples, over fast riff-heavy rhythm hooks and lysergic face-eating vocal effects. So awesomely damaged!! If you were to get only one Chrome album, this would be the one!
NOW AVAILABLE ON CD!!!
We made the first Chui Wan release, White Night, Record of the Week, and now they have returned with a self-titled album on vinyl and it continues in the same dreamy, spacey, and krauty vibe we loved so much the first time around, but this time with much tighter focus on rhythm and movement. The spidery guitar lines and synth filigrees are still very much a signature, but they service more angular post-punk structures feeling like Television combined with the percussive pummel of A Certain Ratio sheathed in dreamy space rock shimmer. Murmured male and female voices anchor the intricate arrangements, and help give thematic weight to songs that are at times seemingly shrouded in beautifully wayward melancholic mystery. So, recommended.
One listen to this and you can see why the likes of Andy Votel and Demdike Stare would rush to release this radiophonic electronic gem on a newly created subsidiary label, Dead-Cert, (a subsidiary of an already subsidiary label Pre-Cert which released lps by Slant Azymuth, Apple Head, and Anworth Kirk). Dead-Cert's mission statement, we've been told, is to reissue albums that virtually no one has heard before and this by all means is one of the rarest of that ilk. Recorded in 1970 for an art installation by Harold Paris in Brussels, there were only 50 copies of Voices of Packaged Souls made, and were given away at the opening. Unlike the material on the recent Suzanne Ciani archive reissue, Lixiviations, Voices of Packaged Souls is 13 experimental sound pieces made on the modular Buchla synthesizer, each one introduced by a male narrator in both English and French, with mystically ominous titles: "First Voice: Sound of Hair Bleeding" "Eight Voice: Sound of Bones Growing", "Seventh Voice: Sound of an Eye Tearing", "Fourth Voice: Sound of Wetness", "Tenth Voice: Sound of A Lighted Window", that suggest a clinical litany of library sounds and actions, similar to the remote feel of a Demdike Stare recording. But what separates this from just a standard bloop-bleep electronic record is the impeccable sound design, with high relief-textural dynamics that jump around the audio spectrum, sometimes sounding right against your ear and other times receding away from you. Would have been neat to see this sound / sculptural installation in person.
Beautifully spooky! And beautifully packaged, too.
Perhaps most widely known as one of the bigger stars of New Age music's MOR commercial peak in the mid-eighties (think Mannheim Steamroller's Fresh Aire series and Ray Lynch's Deep Breakfast), most folks don't necessarily consider the Private Music label's pop new age princess Suzanne Ciani as being a second generation electronic music pioneer or a highly inventive classically trained synthesist. But this fantastic new anthology of early works from Ciani's archive on B-Music/Finders Keepers is aimed at changing that perception.
Fact is, Ciani has had a hand in many of the innovations in electronic music from the late sixties to the early eighties, in what has been a largely male-dominated field. A classically trained pianist, she met Don Buchla through a mutual artist friend and mastered the Buchla Synthesizer (pictured on the cover) and soon began seeking out projects for art galleries, experimental films and pop music (Meco's Star Wars theme for example), before moving to New York and becoming a valuable asset in the experimental underground and commercial advertising fields. She supplied the sounds for Xenon's pinball machines as well as doing sound effects work for films The Stepford Wives and The Incredible Shrinking Woman. Her company Ciani Musica became a testing ground for many of electronic and computerized music's new developments where she built up an incredible portfolio of recording experiments that make up the bulk of this collection.
Alongside advertising spots for Atari, ITT, Almay, and Coca-Cola, are longer compositions of electronic grandeur that point to her later new age music career, but are also steeped in electronic music's recent past. Percolating oscillations, robotic breathing, percussive mechancial rhythms, and long-form and layered computerized tones are assembled into warm and engaging pieces that aptly put Ciani in the same league as Laurie Spiegel, David Behrman and even the BBC Radiophonic Workshop. This is an exciting anthology that sheds light on an overlooked period of electronic music innovation and one of its most vital players. Recommended!
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
SORRY.
We'd never heard of Luciano Cilio before, but of course Jim O'Rourke has. The ubiquitious O'Rourke (Wilco/Sonic Youth/you name it) contributes liner notes to this beautifully presented deluxe digipack cd reissue of what amounts to the collected works of Cilio, an Italian avantgarde composer from the '70s whose music is indeed experimental but less academic than you might expect. But even without O'Rourke's endorsement, a listen to the cd should reveal to you that Cilio was exquisitely talented, and maybe something of a genius. This disc is a simply fantastic document of what we might consider a hybrid of 20th century classical, minimalist psych-prog, and folk music, not entirely of this world. The all-white cover perfectly echoes Cilio's lovely, quietly haunting compositions for acoustic guitar, cello, piano and flute, sometimes visited by wordless female vocals. Achingly melancholic, immensely deep, truly beautiful. Limited to 500 copies, this cd consists of Cilio's sole album, Dialoghi del Presente, originally released on EMI in 1977, along with several previously unreleased tracks. Apparently he more or less abandoned music after the album's release, and sadly committed suicide in 1983. Allan's favorite new long-lost reissue after the Flamen Dialis disc reviewed on list #194...
Longtime regular aQ customer Joshua Maremont commented that Cindytalk's Camoflage Heart is a record which was only really meant for about 30 people. Not that only 30 copies of this record were released, or that it is so terminally obscure and willfully difficult that it by design has a marketing ceiling of an elite few. What he's on about is that Camoflage Heart is such a personal document of self-realized torment, pain, and sorrow that when Cindytalk embarked on the project, it's hard to imagine that they had any delusions about the intensity of this album and the potential for these songs to alienate beyond a limited few.
At the helm of Cindytalk is transgendered vocalist Gordon Sharp, who to this day is probably still best known as one of the multitude of vocalists who appeared in This Mortal Coil. In many ways, Sharp is the masculine equal to the Cocteau Twins' Liz Fraser in delivering expressionist falsettos, trills, and banshee wails in an eerie, yet heavenly fashion. He's one of those few vocalists who can make the lyrics embody their content by shaping the words into emotionally charged sound. In fact, Sharp and Fraser had come together for a duet back during the Cocteau Twins' Peel Sessions of 1983. In his 4AD lineage, Gordon Sharp's first band was the criminally overlooked punk-glam ensemble The Freeze, where his Marc Bolan strut matched the nightmarish lyrics on top of some truly fantastic Bowie / Buzzcocks sparkplug riffs. Sharp, alongside fellow Freeze band members John Byrne and David Clancey, found shortcomings in the glam punk agenda, and sought a wholly new direction that became Cindytalk.
While undeniably dark and theatrical, Cindytalk cannot be pigeonholed as an '80s goth band, even in comparison to such off-kilter groups like The Virgin Prunes, Princess Tinymeat, or Sex Gang Children. Camoflage Heart was Cindytalk's first album and originally came out in 1984; and it's an album like those This Heat albums which is quite unique in terms of production and aesthetic. The album opens with the militant drum machine of "It's Luxury" setting the stage for an explosion from a monotone guitar riff, coated in amplifier grit, distortion, and detuned heaviness that comes across as a mix between late-'80s Skullflower and The Cure's Pornography. At this moment, Sharp's voice also erupts into the mix crooning with a downtrod beauty to this industrial dirge, spitting and swooning at the same time. The next track "Instinct (Back To Sense)" is more of an ambient interlude with distant heartbeat rhythms, haunted with impressionist piano trickles and Sharp's siren song buried between an atmosphere of smoke and mirror. Two more explosive tracks -- "Under Glass" (featuring Mick Harvey from the Birthday Party for a disjointed stutter of abject rock) and "Memories of Skin and Snow" -- are examples of loud / quiet / loud dynamics, later embraced by the likes of Slint and Mogwai to equally profound effect. "Everybody Is Christ" is often viewed as the pinnacle of Camoflage Heart with its harsh arppegiation of electronics cast against Sharp's heavenly voice. Soon after, the album disintegrates in a cascade of delicate piano, voice, and grim drones.
As Cindytalk had suffered through the fate of several record companies going out of business (first Midnight Records then World Serpent), their work might have been forgotten had it not been for this reissue. Thankfully, that oversight can now be remedies with this long overdue reissue.
So the rumor goes that Gordon Sharp was invited to join Duran Duran after Sharp dissolved his Edinburgh glam-punk band The Freeze in the late '70s. He turned them down. Elizabeth Fraser and Robin Guthrie also put out the request for Sharp to join the Cocteau Twins. After a brief stint accompanying the Cocteau Twins for a Peel Session in 1982 and a guest spot on This Mortal Coil's It'll End In Tears, he opted for his own project -- the obscure, yet majestic Cindytalk.
In This World is an opus in every sense of the word. Originally, In This World came out in 1988 as two separate albums under the same name, each with slightly different artwork. One album, a masterpiece of abject post-punk that in all honesty is the closest parallel to Swans' Children Of God; the other, a delicate ambient construct of melancholy piano scarred with surface noice prognosticating pretty much everything that Type Records has released (e.g Machinefabriek, Jasper TX, etc.). It's very good thing that both of these albums have been repackaged into one self-contained object, as the only half of In This World that seemed to be floating around was the piano-laced ambient one. As good as that half is, you need the grit and dirge of its companion album to complete Cindytalk's ideas of grand dualities: heaven / hell, pleasure / pain, holiness / transgression, etc.
While billed by Sharp as the 'disgusting' part of the In This World diptych, the first half begins with a lovely tonefloat of scratched violin drones and painterly piano notes. Yet, with the crushing rhythm and noise attack of "Janey's Love," Sharp does not disappoint with his disgusting tag. This is a monstrous industrial dirge with huge monotone slabs of distortion and atonal drones counterpointing Sharp's soaring falsetto. The punk poet Kathy Acker supplies a brief spoken word interlude as the coda to this incendiary number. Immediately hereafter, Cindytalk continue their turgid rhythmic marches with an angular distorted rhythm, slippery bassline mired in audio rust, and twin guitars spitting acid, fire, and brimstone on such tracks as "Gift Of A Knife" and "Circle Of Shit." As the first half of the album progresses, the songs steadily disintegrate as rhythm, song structure, and noise all collapse into a blur of smeared grey that is eerily reflective of William Basinski's Disintegration Loops. The piano which opened In This World becomes the dominant sound in Cindytalk's soundscapes, also marking the delineation between the two halves of In This World. Yes, this is the beautiful side of Cindytalk, coated in ash, snow, bruises, and rust. Gordon Sharp's piano playing comes from Brian Eno's Thursday Afternoon, which in turn came from Erik Satie; and that impressionist sentiment continues forward amidst subterranean drones and field recordings of barren spaces. Sharp's voice is mostly absent from these tracks, although the eponymous finale to the album showcases one of Sharp's most emotive croons. They really don't make albums like this any more, with such attention to detail and dynamics between rage and beauty.
Fortunately, both of these records were concise enough that they could both fit onto one CD; and if you've not had the opportunity to hear Cindytalk, please do not let this album and its predecessor Camoflage Heart pass you by!
WOW. Maybe it took taking a while off, and letting some other guys make a super-heavy (death metal!) album under the name Circle, while goofing around with the ironic '80s pop of alter-ego band Falcon, but Circle, now that they're Circle again, have really managed to blow us away with this one, even entrancing some of us here who aren't the 'usual' Circle fanatics. Despite all the silly high concept stuff they delight in, Leviatan once again proves that these guys are serious artists, geniuses really. No sharks have been jumped as yet.
The sticker on the cover proclaims: "Circle (ex-Falcon) have returned from Falcon-land in exquisite atmo-psych form!" which we can surely attest to and wholeheartedly agree with. Leviatan pretty much became a unanimous store favorite as soon as we first laid ears on it. Yet before we did, we didn't quite expect what they meant by "atmo-psych" to actually be such a beautifully delivered kraut-tinged acid folk record almost entirely played on acoustic instruments, conjuring up legendary associations with Comus (especially on the song "Protectorate"), Fresh Maggots, Faust, The Inner Space, Joakim Skogsberg and other ye olde folky aQ faves and yet also sounding as intense and psychically heavy as the latest Swans album, To Be Kind (though not quite as sprawling!).
Opening with gentle and primeval filigreed acoustic guitar riffs churning like smoke, swirling and building in on each other, anchoring subtle spacey tones taken from NASA satelite recordings and setting the tone for a processional recitation of an old Finnish text. Next, a medieval trio of banjo, bouzouki, and hand percussion and some deep monolithic chanting propel a kind of ritual invocation that nearly turns savage as Mika's vocals get more intense and paganish. But every dark passage on Leviatan is mirrored by some of the prettiest music we have heard from Circle in a while, especially on the Faust-ish ballad, "Post-Kapitalismus" and the sweet instrumental "Rakeita". Elsewhere moody folk jams, deep mystical paeans and avant Finnish-folk group sing-alongs, lead us to a final rounding call of solemn guitar weaving and ghostly breaths in what could only represent a slow-fading chiming forest-y death. Incredible!
Wow! We haven't been this excited about a new project in quite a while. Citay is a new band created by Ezra Feinberg (Piano Magic) along with Tim Green (The Fucking Champs, and about a million other projects). What an amazing exercise in how you can take from influences that have been exhausted by so many in all the wrong ways yet somehow find a way to discover the gold that's never been mined before. According to Feinberg, Citay is influenced by Led Zeppelin, Black Sabbath, Queen, and Heart...but wait don't think this is about irony or played-out 70's rock worship. Citay get to the blissed out acoustic moments of the above mentioned bands (think Queen II, Sabbath Vol.4) to create something that sounds so fresh, breezy and full of the right kind of dirt and sunlight. With an onslaught of guitars (mostly acoustic and including some 12 strings), nice textural sounds created by mandolin, flute, organ, piano, vibes and a an overall sound that is hard to talk about without using really over the top words like..perfect! They nailed how this kind of record should sound. The guitars are so sweeping yet intimate, the vocals seep into your skin and all of a sudden it feels like the longest summer day ever, the kind that you never want to end. We can't stop listening to this and each time we do, all we can think about is finding our old huffy and riding through dirt lots as the sun shimmers down on us and we pedal through twilight. So totally recommended!
Another awesome French pop chanteuse gets resurrected from obscurity, thanks to the Born Bad label. Clothilde (whom we first heard through those awesome Sixties Girls and Swinging Mademoiselle comps of femme French pop) was the stage name of Elizabeth Beauvais, the daughter of an actress and writer who, despite wanting to follow her mother into the acting world, was pushed instead into the music business by producer Germinal Tenas.
Tenas, a producer known for arrangements involving unusual instrumentation, signed her to Vogue Records in the mid-sixties and rechristened her after the beloved medieval Queen and Saint instrumental in bringing Catholicism to France. Clothilde only recorded two eps for the Vogue label in 1967 (both captured here) before becoming fed up by the business and leaving it for good. Which really is tragic, because these are some of the most infectious French pop tracks we have heard in a while with swinging arrangements peppered with marimbas, flutes, violins, bells and Farfisas. Clothilde co-wrote a couple of tracks herself and they were noted for their shocking (at the time) use of sexual double entendres, perhaps adding to the sex-kitten image she really didn't want to have. Thus an untimely end of what could have been a promising singing career. Like so many French pop obscurities, we're thankful for the labor of love that goes into making sure these great tracks see the light of day once again!
The later Cluster records, Grosses Wasser and Curiosum, recorded after the Cluster and Eno collaboration in 1977, often undeservedly get short shrift. Marked by a move back to Berlin to work with former Tangerine Dreamer, Peter Baumann, 1979's Grosses Wasser shows Cluster moving forward expansively in their "nature-man-machine" aesthetic while at the same time harkening back to the unformed melodies of their debut. This album is quite the grower, five short pieces with a nineteen minute closing track that is always a dramatically different listening experience each time we play it. Slippery and evasive, shifting subtlety from oceanic piano passages to lurching bell rhythms, trumpet call and responses, woozy funk, hints of klezmer, machine dub, even whale song, all soaking in an elementally warm haze that only Cluster could conjure. Soooo Nice!!!!!!!
Hopefully Water will consider reissuing Curiosum as well. AQ customer Wobbly, who is an avid Cluster fan, noticed that in the liner notes for this, that Water included the Cluster photo from the Curiosum album, sparking fears that a Curiosum reissue is not in the works. We can only hope this isn't so.
This long awaited reissue of Cluster's stellar 1976 recording, Sowiesoso (So Not So So) sees Roedelius and Moebius at their most collaborative and creative. Recorded after moving to the tiny village of Forst from West Berlin, the progressive evolution of Cluster's solely improvised sound from free-form cavernous synth-scapes to percolating motorik pop had already been documented on their Zuckerzeit album from 1975. On Sowiesoso, that sound gets even more refined, with Moebius's machinist currents of whirs and klangs jutting up against Roedelius's serene Eastern pastoralism, resulting in a haunting mix of pensive ambient beauty that matches the idyllic countryside pictured on the front cover.
So Recommended!
