(Ajna) lp 16.98

VACCINA, LINO CAPRA Antico Adagio (Die Schachtel) cd 22.00
This 1978 minimalist masterpiece by Italian composer Lino Capra Vaccina got reissued last year on the Die Schachtel label but quickly went out of print. Now the cd (which includes 4 bonus tracks) has been repressed, we can finally list it, as it's a wondrous masterpiece of minimal majesty that sits somewhere loosely between new age and world music sensibilities as well as electronic and avant-garde. Vaccina is a percussionist and composer and inspired by Steve Reich's Drumming album, created this work which is grounded in percussion but at the same time atypical of what a percussion focused piece would be expected to sound like. Using vibraphones, gongs, and marimbas, Vaccina employs a long-form sonorous foundation built on timbres and resonances that build abstractly into sublime dreamy clusters. Filtered voices and electronic enhancements give flowering shape to the scrapes and bells, evolving into meditative ruminations and curious otherworldly sounds. Magnificent in scope, there is a connecting thread to like-minded composers such as Roberto Cacciapaglia, David Behrman, Nuno Canavarro and early Anton Batagov. Even Kieran Hebden of Four Tet is a major fan (he provides the liner notes here). Incredibly moving and highly recommended!
Note: Vaccina vinyl has been released (and repressed) as well, but the tracks from this disc are spread across two separate lps, each of which cost more than this single cd - the original six-track album Antico Adagio and another called Frammenti Da Antico Adagio containing the four bonus tracks included on this cd. We'll stock 'em soon, though, so let us know if you're interested.
MPEG Stream: "Elegy"
MPEG Stream: "Voice in XY"
MPEG Stream: "Fragments of Sleep"
MPEG Stream: "Ancient Adagio"

ATKINSON, FELICIA & JEFRE CANTU-LEDESMA Comme Un Seul Narcisse (Shelter) lp 23.00
A beguiling album from two of our favorite experimentalists that collects and sifts sounds which were probably not intended to be recorded; and uses the naked innocence of these sounds to articulate a dreary melancholy through the poetics of this fragile album of musique concrete. There is no center, no real narrative from Atkinson and Cantu-Ledsesma; and that decision of lack is by design which juxtaposes incidental music (piano, mbira, guitar, cello, ambient synth, etc.), forgotten sounds of everyday life (birdsong, rummaging through twig and debris, non-placed shuffling, the digital recorder left on in a coat pocket, etc.), and snipped vocal whispers of desire and loss. These very analog sounds counteract the judicious use of digital fragmentation that serves to further dislocate the original sounds from their humble origin. The two state "this 'neither/nor' music confronts abstraction to the impermanence of concrete materials." That is a very apt way of describing this. Compositionally, this reminds us very much of the way that Andrew Chalk has been reducing his work to the barest minimal, yet with textural inquisitiveness of Crys Cole and her own fragmentation of voice, found object, and feminine desire, couched with the deeply fragmented digital pixilation of Microstoria.
MPEG Stream: "O"
MPEG Stream: "E"
MPEG Stream: "ME"

BITCHIN BAJAS & BONNIE PRINCE BILLY Epic Jammers And Fortunate Little Ditties (Drag City) lp 22.00
By far the most impacting and revelatory record Will Oldham has been a part of in over a decade! While we've always been Bonnie 'Prince' Billy fans, we can't deny that its been a while since Oldham has made something that truly has moved and touched us in the same ways albums like I See A Darkness or Master And Everyone did.
It seems like Bitchin' Bajas knew this as well and used their opportunity to collaborate with Oldham as a way to give him a sprawling & meditative canvas that he could reconnect with the more trance inducing & ritualistic elements of his musical mind.
This is such a perfect match, as Oldham's presence gives the Bajas sound a soul and weight that rings with an eternal quality that has us thinking of one of our very favorite Richard Youngs albums, The Naive Shaman.
This is the sort of record that you will put on and never even consider stopping until it plays to the end. It has cast us into such a rewarding and deep meditative trance and really makes us hope that this this effort is just the beginning of a continuing collaboration, as BB & BPB are a match made in sonic heaven (i.e. we want more epic jams and fortunate little ditties, stat!).
MPEG Stream: "Nature Makes Us For Ourselves"
MPEG Stream: "You Are Not "Superman""
MPEG Stream: "You Will Soon Discover How Truly Fortunate You Really Are"

BODY, THE No One Deserves Happiness (Thrill Jockey) lp 23.00
The Body, despite having become one of the more prolific heavy bands around, have not had a proper solo full-length released since 2013's Christs, Redeemers, tending to collaborate with artists instead. But here they are on thier own again, and on No One Deserves Happiness, the Body have asserted that they sought to make the "ugliest pop record of all time". In some ways, they may have succeeded. Anyone that's heard the Body before will know that anything they touch is a far cry from Katy Perry, but nonetheless, No One Deserves Happiness is a dose of heaviness that's definitely chock full of pretty melody lines dripping with murky atmospherics. While some among the aQuarius staff are not exactly fans of vocalist Chip King's piercing shriek, the good news is that those, um, somewhat difficult to take vocals are minimal here, the album having a few strictly instrumental tracks, and others graced with the angelic croon of Chrissy Wolpert (quite a contrast with Chip). All in all, this is the best solo effort we've heard from The Body yet.
FYI while they last we have the special pink vinyl version, if you get the vinyl! And also fyi and btw, The Body also (of course) have a new collaborative cd out, with Full Of Hell, on Neurot, that we just got in, too.
MPEG Stream: "Wanderings"
MPEG Stream: "Shelter Is Illusion"
MPEG Stream: "Two Snakes"

CARIBOU Up In Flames (Leaf) lp+cd 17.98
Another one in the 20 year anniversary of the Leaf label reissue series! Here's more or less what we said about Up In Flames some years ago...
The Torontonian musician Dan Snaith who now goes by the professional moniker Caribou used to prefer to be addressed by the name of a Canadian prairie province. Minor legal battles ensued with the elder musical artist Handsome Dick Manitoba claiming the name, and the rest is history. While Snaith was Manitoba, he released two terrific albums - 2003's Up In Flames and 2001's Start Breaking My Heart - which were eventually reissued under his 'new' name, each with extra material. Snaith has amassed quite an impressive body of work to since then, and fans of more recent outings like Our Love who missed this old fave should be happy to check it out.
Caribou here could easily draw comparisons to fellow electronic popsters such as Jimmy Tamborello's select projects (Dntel, James Figurine, Postal Service) and the whole Morr Music roster (Lali Puna, Isan, Styrofoam), but incorporates a broader palette of more defined styles and influences. Swirling dreaminess occasionally drifting into jazzy shoegazer territory. Always a pleasure!
MPEG Stream: "Jacknuggeted"
MPEG Stream: "Cherrybomb Part II"

COBALT Slow Forever (Profound Lore) 2lp 36.00
We've never reviewed anything by these guys before, not sure why - they get tons of love from the metal scene, and while they may have actually been purely black metal at one point, the black metal on Slow Forever is tempered by all sorts of distinctly UN black metal sound. The opening track sets the stage, and is the perfect template for Cobalt's unique approach, starting off wind blown and desolate, twangy and deserty, sounding more like Woven Hand or Sixteen Horsepower, and when the song really kicks in, blasting beats and frantic riffing, shrieked vox, they somehow manage to take those BM tropes and tangle them all up with a more properly ROCK sound. It's a pretty dizzying concoction, but it's also fucking great, and catchy as hell. The sound lurches from groovy riffage, to wild blasting frenzy, to swagger death and roll and back again. And so it goes, the sound a heavy hybrid of lots of things we dig, assembled into something pretty goddamn unique, and something that we find totally mesmerizing. It's like Americana infused black buzz, or hard rocking, hellish black twang, whatever you call it, it manages to be both intense and brutal, moody and atmospheric, and eminently headbangable, which is a pretty tough feat to pull off. We don't remember being as impressed with these guys before, but this record definitely has end of the year best of list potential.
There's also been plenty of personal drama going on with these guys, can't remember what it was all about, but you've got the internet, you can look it up, if you're curious about that kind of stuff. Regardless, this RULES.
MPEG Stream: "Hunt The Buffalo"
MPEG Stream: "Cold Breaker"
MPEG Stream: "Final Will"

ED BALLOON No Smoking (Deathbomb Arc) cd 5.98
Our pals at Deathbomb Arc deliver unto us yet another weirdo hip hop discovery, this one from a Boston MC named Ed Balloon, whose sound is a fantastic fusion of melodic hip-pop and future R&B;, and thus a perfect fit alongside all the other crazy shit on Deathbomb Arc. All it should take is one listen to "Graduate", which in a perfect world would be all over the radio, and sounds like a way weirder, way more playful Kanye jam, with maybe a little Caribbean flavor. It's hook-heavy and so totally infectious. We listened to that track five or six times before we even made it to the rest of the record. And the rest of the tracks here are pretty much just as good, from the moody, nocturnal slow jammage of "Night Crawler", to the lo-fi psychedelic groove pop of "Tick-Tock", to the fuzzy fusiony "Bassline". Not as noisy or freaky as a lot of Deathbomb Arc stuff, but it's easy to see why those guys dug it enough to release it, and why we can't seem to stop listening to it.
MPEG Stream: "Blow Up"
MPEG Stream: "Graduate"

FINAL BOSS Enforcer (Sleeping Giant Glossolalia) cassette 5.98
The latest blast of sonic weirdness/radness from our pals at the Sleeping Giant Glossolalia comes courtesy of a band called Final Boss, and to be honest, with that name, and the black eyed visage on the cover, we were expecting some sort of cock rocking, big riffing heaviness, but were pleased to discover it was something else entirely, a twisted bit of home brewed industrial electronica, or beat driven murk, or who knows what exactly, we just know that we dig it. They call it 'bunkerbeat' (not be confused with bvnkvrfvnk) and it does truly sound like it was recorded in a bunker, the sound is in constant flux, tape drop outs, the sound peaking, and grinding into the red, in some ways it's what we imagine it might sound like if Faxed Head made a techno record, and you know that is high praise indeed.
The tracks are blurry smears of muddy thrum, squelchy static, muted motorik mumbles, the beats not so much beats as little bursts of sculpted hiss, while melodies moan and melt, the sound itself devolves into something more like the feral cries of a sentient machine, trying desperately to communicate, its staticky transmissions gloriously garbled, a series of tranced out anti-grooves and crumbling, blackened creeps. It's a beautiful, and baffling barrage of DIY electro-noise minimalism and WTF negative beat science.
MPEG Stream: "Dance Floor Justice"
MPEG Stream: "Break North"

FLUXION Vibrant Forms II (Subwax Bcn) 2cd 23.00
AT LAST, A REISSUE OF THIS SOUGHT-AFTER ELECTRONIC ALBUM. The original, out of print Chain Reaction edition has been going for crazy prices (for a cd) online, so we're happy it's been made available again, it's truly a classic. Here's what we said about it the first time 'round way back on list #104, sixteen years ago:
At its best, techno is an effortless sound with the technician merely setting up parameters for drum machines, basslines, and melodic patterns that get subtle tweaks, filters, and modulations applied to them to keep everything from being static, locked grooves. Chain Reaction has been at the vanguard of techno productions with a post-dub sound that modernizes the delayed tape hiss which eerily floated through Lee "Scratch" Perry's '70s production work. The process of creating the Chain Reaction sound was of course a digital one, giving a cold metallic patina to the ghostly patterns which hovered above a classic Detroit techno groove. The sound of Chain Reaction had been pioneered by artists like Monolake, Porter Ricks, and Vainquer - all German artists who have since left the label for other pursuits. While not populated by Germans, Chain Reaction has still attracted artists whose agenda is to continue in the Chain Reaction sound. They may not be German, but they certainly sound it.
Fluxion's Vibrant Forms II stands out from the recent crop of Chain Reaction releases with a set of grooves that could easily hail from Wolfgang Voigt's Kompakt series, that has been coupled with the cold shimmer of the Chain Reaction sound. Like Gas' Konigforst, we could listen to this all day and never get sick of it.
MPEG Stream: "Equilibrium"
MPEG Stream: "Aviation"

FLYING SAUCER ATTACK Further (Drag City) lp 21.00
Finally reissued on vinyl after 20+ years are these two essential releases from British "Rural Psych" pioneers Flying Saucer Attack. Further from 1994 was the group's second full length, and Chorus from 1995 was the group's second compilation of singles, unreleased songs and Peel Sessions and still stands as the band's high water mark.
Calling FSA a band is a bit of a misnomer as over time, it has been mostly the operation of David Pearce (who recently reemerged FSA after a long hiatus with the Instrumentals 2015 lp we made a Record Of The Week last year), though Rachel Brook (later of Movietone) was a founding and key member on these two releases. Contributions from Third Eye Foundation and Rocker on various releases and singles marked the group as a loose rotating collective with Pearce being the only constant. Their sound marked by soft, nearly incomprehensible vocals over sheets of feedback, ambient noise and acoustic guitar folk strums, were often recorded directly into a stereo system rather than a recording studio. The music often sounding like far-off transmissions beamed from distant static-filled planets, and the album art of remote enigmatic landscapes and horizons with cryptic messages, such as "home-recording is reinventing music" "less is more" "stepping stones", and our personal favorite, "keep vinyl alive" (on a cd-only ep no less), always drew us further into their mysterious spell.
While their self-titled 1993 debut lp introduced them to the world with huge squalls of noise over Jesus and Mary chain-ish dream pop, Further is a more intense album in its restraint. Not that it ain't noisy, it totally is, but it has longer passages of space, intense drones, field recordings and a somewhat subdued deep night quality. The sung melodies are quieter, more folky and whispered. The acoustic guitar is more present, and there are almost no beats or much rhythm for that matter. It's a record that in its low fidelity and time-stopping beauty totally paved the way for bands like Grouper or Windy and Carl. Like the cover suggests, it has the feel of waiting all night in a cold dark wood for signs of remote alien existence and only finding yourself very deeply transformed. Both come highly recommended.
MPEG Stream: "In The Light of Time"
MPEG Stream: "Come and Close My Eyes"
MPEG Stream: "Still Point"

FLYING SAUCER ATTACK Chorus (Drag City) lp 17.98
Finally reissued on vinyl after 20+ years are these two essential releases from British "Rural Psych" pioneers Flying Saucer Attack. Further from 1994 was the group's second full length, and Chorus from 1995 was the group's second compilation of singles, unreleased songs and Peel Sessions and still stands as the band's high water mark.
Calling FSA a band is a bit of a misnomer as over time, it has been mostly the operation of David Pearce (who recently reemerged FSA after a long hiatus with the Instrumentals 2015 lp we made a Record Of The Week last year), though Rachel Brook (later of Movietone) was a founding and key member on these two releases. Contributions from Third Eye Foundation and Rocker on various releases and singles marked the group as a loose rotating collective with Pearce being the only constant. Their sound marked by soft, nearly incomprehensible vocals over sheets of feedback, ambient noise and acoustic guitar folk strums, were often recorded directly into a stereo system rather than a recording studio. The music often sounding like far-off transmissions beamed from distant static-filled planets, and the album art of remote enigmatic landscapes and horizons with cryptic messages, such as "home-recording is reinventing music" "less is more" "stepping stones", and our personal favorite, "keep vinyl alive" (on a cd-only ep no less), always drew us further into their mysterious spell.
Chorus, for many of us, is where the band truly came into their own and like most watershed moments, this was their last record with the classic line-up and sound. Brook would leave to form Movietone, and the band in their cryptic liner notes suggested this was the end of Phase One and that Phase Two would soon emerge. Even though that was sort of an inside joke on the band's part, Chorus does feel like it's wrapping up loose ends. While not a proper full length of new material, it did contain tracks from various sessions that would be near impossible to track down on their own. This is the album where the band was able to achieve the remarkable balance of intensity and distance, creating a physical sound that was loud but also remote, bringing it all together through the echoing of demo and dub versions of two of the key tracks. It has all of the FSA hallmarks: blistering dream-pop, languid melancholic feedback laden folk, shoegazing ambient drift and post-rock abstract heft. Both come highly recommended.
MPEG Stream: "Feedback Song"
MPEG Stream: "Popol Vuh III"
MPEG Stream: "Always"
MPEG Stream: "Beach Red Lullaby"

GENOCIDE ORGAN Obituary Of The Americas (Tesco Organisation) cd 17.98
Genocide Organ (featuring members of the aQ noise favorites Anenzephalia and Ke/Hil) is a stalwart German industrial / power electronics outfit who have been active since the late '80s and have married a confrontational iconography of war and fascism with an uncompromisingly brutal take on electronic noise. Since the days of Throbbing Gristle and SPK, this dialectic between control and its attempted dismantling through noise as a principle for industrial culture has not been an easy one to parse, often leading to accusations of fascism. The political aesthetic of Genocide Organ leads them to overlay political rants, barked declarations of warmongering, and non-descript screams into the sky (all of which are appropriated) amidst their beds of atonal electronics, squalls of feedback, barren rhythmic plod, and their own monotone sermons on social and economic woe. It all makes for a harrowing and unsettling body of work (exemplified here on the Obituary Of The Americas, which looks mostly to South and Central America as the operating theatre of choice) in which the politics of upheaval do not come to resolution through revolution from either left or right, but situate within a continuum of human conflict and bloodlust. The world can be a fucking bleak place.
MPEG Stream: "Formacion de Guerilla"
MPEG Stream: "Escuela de las Americas"
MPEG Stream: "Kaibil"

GLANDS OF EXTERNAL SECRETION Absent Minded Control Freak (Butte County Free Music Society) cd-r 8.98
Gurgle and mumble goes these Glands Of External Secretion - the inscrutable collaboration between the charmed songwriter Barbara Manning and the cryptozoological specialist Seymour Glass (founding father of the delightfully / mindblowingly weird magazine Bananafish). Glands Of External Secretion follow the activity of Glass more so than that of Manning, who Glass credits as a fearless contributor to his unhinged collages that stem from his ongoing contributions to the Butte County Free Music Society, the ramshackle Northern California stepchild of the Los Angeles Free Music Society. Accidents are certainly not only welcome but they are encouraged in these strategies for squishily devolved sound. Think Smegma, think irr. app. (ext.).
On Absent Minded Control Freak, a limited edition cd-r of an unknowable edition, Glass and Manning utter a sonic glossolalia of nocturnal lunacy channelled through tape, found-sound, radiophonic, and turntable meanderings that give a crack plenty of Mr. Splitfoot knockings and other bumps in the night that would have situated as fodder for religious quackery in earlier days.
MPEG Stream: "Beta Glut A.R.G"
MPEG Stream: "Benzene And Albumin"
MPEG Stream: "My Only Freb, The Ebb"

HOFFMAN, KAY Floret Silva (Sommor) lp 28.00
We've had the cd reissue of this gem before, but now for the very first time it's been reissued on vinyl, too! What does Floret Silva sound like, you ask? How about RennFaire gone Rock In Opposition? Italian prog meets medieval madrigals?? We're still puzzling about how to describe this wonderful, wonderful disc, a reissue of a rare lp which was recorded by composer Kay Hoffman in Florence, Italy in 1977, though not released until 1985, on vinyl in Japan only!
Hoffman and her collaborators, including members of the very excellent and arty Italian prog band Pierrot Lunaire, took a trove of medieval Latin poetry known as the Carmina Burana - poems written by anonymous authors around 1200 AD that are both religious in nature as well as very earthy and real, about such subjects as love and money - and set them to music. The settings are diverse (as befits the variety of these texts), and the results are often eerie and pretty and even a little bit groovy, with quirky chamber ensemble/prog rock backing and even the use of field recordings. Utterly magical for the most part, most especially due to the delicate vocals of Jacquline Darby. One song reminds us strongly of Stereolab, others call to mind (rather more obscurely) that Flamen Dialis album we've raved about before. This should appeal to experimental psych-folk fans for sure, even if this unique treasure is really something outside almost any genre designation you'd care to come up with!
MPEG Stream: "Iste Mundus"
MPEG Stream: "Tempus Instat"

HOOKWORMS s/t (Faux Discx / Gringo) cd 15.98
A limited, vinyl-only release originally in 2013, now reissued on compact disc, yay! Really a reissue of a reissue, here's what we said before:
Recently we made the album Pearl Mystic by UK psychedelic space rockers our Record Of The Week, and really how could we not, as it was the perfect mix of sprawling blown out, buzz drenched FX heavy space jams, brooding Spacemen 3 like druggy drift, and Stooges-y garage psych stomp. We played that record to death, and based on how many we sold, seemed like all of you were keen for more Hookworms as much as we were.
So here we have not a new record, but a reissue of an earlier Hookworms, a 4 track ep originally released in 2011, now available again, with a handful of bonus tracks, but more on those in a second. Anyone who bought and dug Pearl Mystic is gonna want this one too, cut from the same LSD soaked cloth, it's another batch of tripped out psychedelic heaviness, this one a bit more raw and noisy, with songs exploding into billowing clouds of swirling FX, buried vocals, and pounding motorik rhythms, laced with long stretches of krautrock like drift (check out the very Can-like opening of "Teen Dreams"), and minimal washes of druggy ambience, some tracks wreathed in warm whirring organs, others smoldering beneath tribal rhythms, and chiming guitars, all four eventually building to full on psychedelic freakouts, but each spending varying amounts of times drifting and shimmering, brooding and drifting dreamily, "Resolution" might be the dreamiest of the bunch, with only a brief foray into freakout, the rest of the track, pulsing and buzzing warmly, and eventually settling into a tranquil sprawl of washed out ethereal ambience. All four tracks really sound like they could have been plucked right off of Pearl Mystic which is not a bad thing at all.
The bonus tracks are culled from singles and compilations and again, are not that far removed from the record proper. "Form And Function" is all warm psychedelic churn and simple propulsive rhythm, but with the vocals soaring over the top, wreathed in echo and reverb, sound more 'rock', a little bit blooze-y, sorta Velvets meets Spacemen 3, but with some serious psychedelic heft added to the proceedings, while "The Correspondent" is all hazy and druggy, woozy and laid back, the sounds seeming to melt and ooze out of the speakers, the vocals even more drenched in FX, super tripped out and hypnotic, the sound lush and layered and eventually blown out and blissed out, and finally, there's the very brief "Deu" which compacts a psychedelic space rock epic into two minutes, fading in at the beginning as if someone popped on the recorded mid-mega jam, pounding drum pummel, swirling guitar skree, the band locked tight, almost looped sounding, until the drums drop out, the guitars turn backwards, and things get even more abstract and trippy. So goddamn good.
As always, if your personal psych/space rock pantheon includes Carlton Melton, White Hills, Heads, the Janitors, Hills, Moon Duo, Wooden Shjips and all the rest, and for some reason Hookworms is not in there too, now's the time to right that wrong!
MPEG Stream: "Medicine Cabinet"
MPEG Stream: "Teen Dreams"
MPEG Stream: "Deu"

IRR. APP. (EXT.) Marteriaux Deplaces (Errata In Exclesis) 2cd-r 15.98
M.S. Waldron makes a piano record; and for those of you who know Mr. Waldron and his absurdist project irr. app. (ext.), you will know that such a proposition would never be confused for the work of such piano troubadours as Billy Joel or Michael McDonald. The piano in question belongs to his sister, who must be a generous soul to allow for Waldron to mistreat her instrument through various prepared piano techniques and Waldron's splattered melodic arrhythmia. These various plunks and sproings and Cageian blorting on the piano work into signature irr. app. (ext.) strategies of psychic / sonic dislocation with vibrators swarmed into densely aggregated drones, anti-raga minimalism creaked out on a harmonium (borrowed from Steven Stapleton who has often recruited Waldron to perform in the live Nurse With Wound ensemble), thrummed electronic vibrations referencing Roland Kayn or Jean-Claude Eloy, and plenty of insects and frogs croaking about. Befuddled and befuddling, Waldron's irr. app. (ext.) is always well worth investigating! Be warned that these self-published cd-r editions from Waldron's Errata In Excelsis are quite limited.
MPEG Stream: "Several Materials"
MPEG Stream: "An Electromagnetic Field Has Taken An Unusual Interest In My Sister's Piano"
MPEG Stream: "Tones For Loobie"

JEALOUSY Paid For It (Moniker Records) lp 14.98
The return of SF's preeminent weirdo dark wave kraut-psych one man band (there's more than one?) and like his aQ beloved debut Viles, it's another mind blowing slab of haunting, skeletal gloom and droned out downer dirgery. Mumbled mush mouthed vocals are draped languorously over Velvetsy guitar drawl, reverbed percussion is splattered throughout, the whole record wreathed in a thick, doped out fug. There re some rockers, that tap into old Hawkwind, and maybe the Stooges, but rendered here as cosmic smears and brain damaged, drug addled, Buttholes style blowouts.
But that's just the beginning, with Paid For It transforming into cool retro synth wave balladry, a little kosmische swirl wound around a pulsing chase scene rhythm, and again wrapped in a production that sounds like an oozing caul of sonic steel wool. If anything this time around, the vibe is more stoned and dethroned, groovy, slow burn soporific drone rocking, a wild concoction of lysergic groove and bleary brained hypno-rock that makes for a heady slab of far out, fucked up, DIY, alien psych genius.
MPEG Stream: "Sentenced To Life"
MPEG Stream: "Doin' A Little Time"
RealAudio clip: "Give Me My Money"

KATE, MARC Despairer (Falling Forms) cassette 6.98
Digital miserablism. Such is the work of longtime San Franciscan electronic musician Marc Kate, who has really flourished over the past few years in developing his own signature of sculpted synth noise and swollen ambient miasma. One could easily situate this aesthetically near the likes of Tim Hecker in his ponderous labyrinths of teasing crescendo or the bluster of Lawrence English's blown-out abstractions. Kate's Despairer is a lament of an album that addresses an growing undercurrent of disaffection with the Bay Area's economic engine that is the tech industry. The politics of such need not be discussed, as Kate maintains an emotional distance on the subject matter through these cosmologically tinged sustained bursts of ambient noise and fizzing melodic fugues of synthesizers pretending they were guitars. Great cover photo too of Kate smeared in vaseline like some sort of reject from a Matthew Barney installation.
MPEG Stream: "All Of The Books We Burned"
MPEG Stream: "Sister Hyde"
MPEG Stream: "No, Nothing Is Ever Haunted"

KIT N C.L.A.W.S. Starving At The Palace Gate (Jacktone) cassette 8.98
The Berlin-by-way-of-San Francisco-based Jacktone label brings us another amazing tape that like The Lavender and odi me tapes we listed before, seems to find a deeply satisfying middle ground between modern techno impulses and ambient soundtrack narratives. Kit N C.L.A.W.S. is a San Francisco based collaboration between Josh "Kit" Clayton (recently of Tujurikkuja) and Brian Hock of Bronze. Starving At The Palace Gates is somewhat of a hauntological romance, not exactly containing the kind of hazy loss of Leyland Kirby nor the Arcadian nostalgia of the Ghost Box label. However its technoish rhythms are more searching like a hungry ghost, tempered by melodies one would find in a romantic French film about unrequited love. Yet all this with a slightly more urban edge of decay and squalor, noir and mystery. Glorious stuff!
Comes with a cool origami op-art insert. Limited!
MPEG Stream: "Neither Hawk Nor Hound"
MPEG Stream: "Obscenities Fall Flat"
MPEG Stream: "Noone Left To Haunt"

LA SERA Music For Listening To Music To (Polyvinyl) lp 21.00
We are head-over-heels for Katy Goodman's ringing falsetto that has sweepingly soared through a large handful of equally wonderful Vivian Girls and La Sera releases. She lands us here on Music For Listening To Music To, La Sera's fourth full-length. Swinging in a slightly new direction, this album takes La Sera's fuzzy dream pop and mixes in a slight folk-country twang. It's like Dolly Parton meets Felt meets the Smiths meets the Breeders and it's everything we never knew we wanted. This Ryan Adams produced album features especially stunning guitar riffs from Todd Wisenbaker that mix the best of surf and seventies rock. Goodman's consistently strong, sharp, somber, and sweet lyrics and harmonies are further elevated by the more frequent inclusion of Wisenbaker's vocals ("Nineties" kicks ass!). We love every second of Music For Listening To Music To; this album could easily lead La Sera down a variety of new, killer paths and after the freshness of this release, we anticipate being totally in step wherever their sound goes.
MPEG Stream: "High Notes "
MPEG Stream: "A Thousand Ways"
MPEG Stream: "Time To Go"

MAMUTHONES Sympathy for the Devil (Rocket) 12" 22.00
We first heard from weirdo Italian kraut-psych trippers Mamuthones a while back on a split 12" with UK noise rock punks. On this new 12", they take their already freaky, funky, experimental space psych sounds even further out. Look no further than the opening track, a totally transformed Rolling Stones cover, layed into a pitch perfect appropriation of the rhythm track from LCD Soundsystem's "Losing My Edge" - all jittery, post punk rhythms, crunchy guitar jangle, strange sung/spoken vocals, not to mention looped background vocals (ooooh ooooh), the sound gradually building momentum, the song soon smothered in swoonsome melodic swaths in wild swirls of FX. The second proper track is more of the same, spoken word over tribal hypno-psych pound, squalls of gristly guitar crunch, a sort of skeletal space psych freakout.
The flipside of the 12" is filled out with remixes, both A side tracks get seriously reworked, one becomes super minimal, sounding a bit like some druggy Steve Reich / Moon Duo mashup, the vocals dripping with reverb and delay, the background sounds, bleeding and blurring into a psychedelic smear, while guitars howl and wail over the top, the other ditches the guitars completely, and is just drums and vocals, with some swirly synths, which makes for a trippy avant kraut-funk, jittery post punk workout.
LIMITED TO 300 COPIES!
MPEG Stream: "Sympathy For The Devil"

MB (MAURIZIO BIANCHI) Symphony For A Genocide (Rotorelief) lp 27.00
Some of the most abject and brilliantly bleak dronemusic ever, now reissued on "battle green and black" vinyl via Rotorelief, in a limited numbered edition of 500.
Symphony For A Genocide wasn't the first recording by this Italian Industrialist, as he did have some earlier productions as Sacher-Pelz and the infamous Leibstandarte SS MB albums (on which Whitehouse's William Bennett dubbed various Nazi speeches on top of Bianchi's music without Bianchi's permission). Bianchi's work does come out of a transgressive mindset; but one that is uniformly misanthropic, nihilistic, and utterly black. On this album, MB constructs brutal, hallucinatory blasts of electronic noise and grinding rhythms of hand-cut tape noise and overblown synthetic distortion. These bleak chilling drones are reminiscent of Conrad Schnitzler at his most neurotic, Nurse With Wound at their most droning, and Whitehouse at their least annoying. MB's very prolific career in the early '80s with more than a dozen records was cut short in 1984 at which time he declared himself a Jehovah's Witness and ceased making music until more recently when he finally returned to the blackened ambience of old.
It should also be noted that the recordings of Symphony For A Genocide are drastically different from another set of recordings called SFAG (Symphony For A Genocide), which has also gotten the reissue treatment twice, adding extra confusion into the mix.
MPEG Stream: "Treblinka"
MPEG Stream: "Auschwitz"

NETO Enumeration De Zamvoli / Mouille Reve De Caravoli (Lust Vessel) cassette 21.00
It's very rare indeed to see any of the cassettes from Lust Vessel, that being an imprint that has released some of exemplary, and very limited, pieces of obscurant industrial noise over the past decade. The quality of Lust Vessel's curation (not to mention the scarcity) has lent a cult status to the operation as well as its proprietor, a character who goes by the name Lily Vice. Many of the projects from Lust Vessel emerge only to release one or two things on Lust Vessel and then vanish into the bowels of Tokyo. Neto seems to be one of those Japanese mysteries, with this cassette being the first and only recording available, with no additional context whatsoever. It's a suitably fucked-up collage of violent acoustic scrapings, nauseating varispeed tape-loops, sicktone rumblings, ugly blurts of feedback, hellish descents of horror-film screams, and decentered turntable cutups all unravelling in a slow-process of self-disintegration. It's not far from the tempestuous tape constructions of early Le Syndicat or the rough hewn collages of Christian Marclay had he made things that were very ill-tempered and psychologically unhinged. This does come with a set of small prints that don't fit in the plastic cassette case, as is common with all of the Lust Vessel catalog. Already sold out at the source.
MPEG Stream: "Enumeration De Zamvoli"
MPEG Stream: "Mouille Reve De Caravoli"

OSCILLATION, THE Monographic (Hands In The Dark) lp 19.98
With a previous outing on Cardinal Fuzz, one of our favorite contemporary outfits of krauty psych-rock hypnosis returns with another fantastic album in the form of Monographic. The band teases out a path between Loop and Spacemen 3, claiming the surging rhythmic grooves in which the former excelled as gravity-wave echoes from a distant black hole and the heavy-lidded fug and black denim distortion of the latter that prompted Spacemen 3 to pen an album called Taking Drugs To Make Music To Take Drugs To. Yup, this is prescription-grade druggy psych-rock with some mighty fine songwriting that oozes out of these arcane /motorik grooves, swirling freak-out smolder, and lava-lamp tumbles of synth, guitar, and FX drone. Look to the Heads, Moon Duo, and White Hills for parallels in this brain-melting ray gun blast of an album. Note that the cd has two extra tracks not on the lp!
MPEG Stream: "Take Us To The Moon"
MPEG Stream: "Truth In Reverse"
MPEG Stream: "Another Attack"

POLKKA LOVE MACHINE s/t (Zhelezobeton /Aquarellist) cd-r 9.98
Long time readers of the aQ list, and we mean looooooong time readers, may remember a Finnish drone outfit called Tiermes (aka Temple Of Tiermes). Tiermes mainman Jussi Saivo did time for a spell in aQ faves Circle, but the music he made in Tiermes was something altogether more grim and sinister, minimal and mysterious. Those Tiermes records remain some of the most stunning dronemusic ever, fusing hushed atmospherics with brooding minimal heaviness.
So we were pretty thrilled to discover that Jussi had a new group, one with the odd moniker Polkka Love Machine. So even though we knew this was the guy behind Tiermes, we had visions of something much more playful and silly (as some Finnish things tend to be), but instead, the sound of Polkka Love Machine is a beautiful, and beautifully bleak extension of the sonic rituals of Tiermes. The sound is more 'rock' only in the sense that it sounds like proper songs, or well, maybe not PROPER songs, but there are actual instruments, the bass is the driving force, the songs rooted to thick, sinewy, low end melodies, in some ways it reminds us of an even more abstract Bohren, and maybe a bit less jazzy, but similarly nocturnal, moody and mysterious. Processed vocals drift in and out, as do fragmented bits of percussion, occasionally fluttery little flights of guitar shimmer flit by, or thick rumbling swells throb ominously before fading into the background. A few moments get almost carnivalesque, but even then, it's creepy, abandoned carnival, the sort nightmares are made of. The rest of the record is more a sort of abstractly tribal drift, barely rhythmic, more sort of softly pulsing, wound up in slithery bass, and ominous overtones, a blackly beautiful, drone-jazz drift, that should definitely appeal to fans of all sounds slow and low, murky and minimal.
MPEG Stream: "Pihlajapuu"
MPEG Stream: "Ensirakkaus"

PRURIENT Annihilationist (Functional Organisation) cd 19.98
Originally a cassette put out by Hospital in 2011 and now reworked for cd release via Tesco's archival series on their Functional subsidiary, Annihilationist finds Prurient eschewing the sequencers of his recent output for a long-form album of synth-noise miserablism. Grimy bellows of feedback surge upon the near constant roar of sunken battleship drones that are further strafed with corrosive distortion, arsenic laced dinscapes, sonar-sweep phased noise, and the occasional Teutonic drum machined plod. When noise artists of a particular caliber have veered into the realm of dark ambient. Think Drumm. Think Menche. Of course, think Fernow, with the Annihilationist being a particularly claustrophobic recording.
MPEG Stream: "Fallen Shrines"
MPEG Stream: "Personification Of Eternity"
MPEG Stream: "Vines Grow Through Columns Atop Successors Ashes"

QUILT Plaza (Mexican Summer) lp 28.00
Quilt have returned with their third full length on psychedelic powerhouse label Mexican Summer and are sounding almost impossibly better than ever. Luscious Beatles-circa-Revolver-esque harmonies, perfectly light string arrangements, warm seventies jangly guitar, and a driving rhythm section contribute to the most timeless yet timely sound. Their amalgam of tripped out psychedelic folk rock and Kinks-y power pop manages to walk in step with, yet stand apart from, their contemporaries Real Estate, Woods, and Widowspeak. Anna Fox's simultaneously strong and shimmery vocals have hit a new high on Plaza (some of our favorite moments are on "Passerby" and "Hissing My Plea"), at times recalling Nico in her solo prime. This album is pure spun-gold, day-dreamy fun and we anticipate this gorgeous piece soundtracking all of our best spring adventures. (Bonus points: The radical "Roller" music video looks like a religious cult family as reimagined by Wes Anderson, plus seamless inclusion of roller skates. Too cool.)
MPEG Stream: "Passerby,"
MPEG Stream: "Eliot St."
MPEG Stream: "Hissing My Plea"

RANGDA The Heretic's Bargain (Drag City) lp 17.98
Instrumental improv supergroup (in our realm, for sure) Rangda, featuring the six-string talents of Ben 'Six Organs' Chasny and Sir Richard Bishop of Sun City Girls infamy, accompanied by drum dervish Chris Corsano, are back with their third album (not counting a live 10" and split with The Dead C). This outing sees Rangda in the mood to have some fun, it would seem, with one randomly song named after Spiro Agnew (Google him, ye millennials) and the music here can get pretty jaunty too - Irwin says it made him feel like he was on a boat (?). Zippy instrumental toonage, with angular grooves and the expected type of esoteric shred that Chasny and Bishop can lay down, coming off a bit like Sun City Girls Lite, not a bad thing says anyone who, like us, has been revisiting the recently reissued Torch Of The Fucking Mystics. And, on the likes of "Hard Times Befall The Door-to-Door Glass Shard Salesman" and a couple other long-form burners, Randga delve into some moody noise-scaping as well, balancing out the zippy boaty-ness elsewhere. Heck, the nearly 20 minute epic "Mondays Are Free At The Hermetic Museum" that closes the album is the sort of tour-de-force only Rangda (or maybe the SCGs) could make seem easy. All in all, another winner from these weirdos, wowza!
MPEG Stream: "To Melt The Moon"
MPEG Stream: "Spiro Agnew"
MPEG Stream: "Hard Times Befall The Door-To-Door Glas Shard Salesman"

SKOGSBERG, JOAKIM Jola Rota (Subliminal Sound) lp 32.00
THIS AQ FAVE, A FORMER RECORD OF THE WEEK, REPRESSED ON VINYL!! YAY!!
Back in 2008 when we listed the Japanese import, Tiliqua label cd edition of this fantastic reissue and made it a Record Of The Week, we promised folks that there was going to be a super limited vinyl version too on Tiliqua coming out few months later, and people scrambled to pre-order it... but it never ever materialized. We hoped and waited but it never came out. Not sure what happened, but thankfully, though, at long last the Subliminal Sounds label (Dungen, Parson Sound, Baby Grandmothers, Peter Grudzien, etc.) from Skogsberg's home country of Sweden has taken charge and given life to this wonderful album again on vinyl for the first time in over 30 years. So, here's what we said before about the cd edition...
Even if we didn't make this Record of the Week, we'd probably still be selling quite a few of 'em, as we're sure we've got a lot of knowledgeable record-collector-type customers for whom adding this to cart will be but the work of a second, the second after their eyes bug out upon seeing the artist and title listed above. But since this reissue is not only of an incredible rarity but also of an incredible record, we wanted to make sure everybody heard about it, besides those for whom it's already a "holy grail". Yep, Joakim Skogberg's original 1972 Jola Rota lp definitely falls into the highly obscure "holy grail" category, a lost treasure for lovers of weird, wonderful acid-folk and underground psychedelia. The sort of thing that develops a legend that it can't possibly live up to... but then DOES, blowing minds when it's finally reissued. The sort of thing that's whispered about among connoisseurs of psych, written of in a few select fanzines and blogs, heard only by a lucky few who got an Nth generation cassette dub or cd-r burn from a friend, who got it from a friend, and so on. The sort of thing, that even a few years after a brief exposure to its wonders, will make you stop and think every once in a while, dang when is someone finally gonna reissue that amazing obscure album??? Some other recently excavated examples would include Moolah's Woe Ye Demons Possessed, Bobb Trimble's Harvest Of Dreams, and Gary Higgins's Red Hash... and before that, once upon a time Comus's First Utterance too would have fallen into that category. Bruce Haack's Electric Lucifer as well, though originals of that were and are much MUCH easier to come by. Whereas *this* album was originally pressed in an edition of around just one thousand copies - of which only a few hundred were ever sold back in the day, with the remainder of the pressing being, gasp, melted down to be recycled into other lps!
So, here it is, artist Joakim Skogsberg's lone album Jola Rota finally, officially reissued for the very first time! Our hearts went pitter pat when we found out. We first heard this when our friend Loren Chasse (of Of/Thuja/Jewelled Antler/etc. fame) floated us a cd-r burn he had gotten from a pal overseas a couple years ago, as per the scenario outlined above. He figured we'd like it, and of course he was right. What's not to like? Swedish-forest-folk hippie ritual mixed with droned-out psych guitar. Truly strange, and captivating, vocal mumble. And, get this, it was actually mostly recorded out in a forest, on portable reel-to-reel gear!! Once out of the woods, the raw recordings were overdubbed (Skogsberg being responsible for all sounds on this album) in studio, but remain quite raw, the mystery and majesty of northern landscapes, dark shadowy places, placid lakes, tall trees and moss-covered rocks utterly alive in the music of the nature-loving Skogsberg.
Side One starts off with "Jola Fran Ingbo", which introduces Joakim's unusual "Jola" singing style derived from Swedish trad folk, also heavily influenced by Buddhist chant, accompanied by staccato bowings of ominous violin. Immediately this is waaaay darker than most other Swedish folk/psych we've heard! Seriously droney and austere. That's followed by the more freaked out, rockier "Offer Rota", which finds Skogsberg singing whilst pounding away on percussion and unfurling a thick layer of distorted guitar murk, with what sounds like a Jew's Harp warbling in the background. The next piece, "Fridens Lijor", on the other hand, is an unaccompanied vocal piece, close-miced and intimate, all about Skogsberg's fragile Jola babble...
Beginning side two, "Besvarjelse Rota" builds up a dubby, bassy electronic rhythmic whomp-whomp throb beneath its damaged psych guitar wail, that (in our warped imagination) foreshadows modern minimal techno a la Chain Reaction, "heroin house" beats.... could almost be Pole jamming with Algarnas Tradgard or something! Later, the lengthy "Jola Fran Stensate" harkens back to the solemnity of the album's first track, and then "Jola Fran Leksand" winds up this unique, amazing trip with something of a pagan campfire dance piece, for folky fiddle and rattling hand percussion.
Overall, though, Jola Rota's mood is solitary and ceremonial. Skogsberg not a guru leading his followers, but rather one man, inspired, singing devotional songs to nature, in personal communion with the ancient deities of Sweden and the universe... it IS universal, probably why it sounds simultaneously like krautrock and Tibetan worship and Native American prayer-songs. The universality of the drone, and the human voice in spiritual reverence regardless of language. At its droniest, many moments here recall Parson Sound or the aforementioned Moolah. Totally, magically mesmeric. Wow... EVERYONE who's heard this since we got it in has been entranced.
Remastered from the original tapes with the help of Skogsberg himself. There's also new liner notes and previously unpublished photos of the long haired and bearded (of course) Skogsberg included, just like the cd version (which, being a Japanese import, isn't much cheaper than this Swedish import vinyl!).
MPEG Stream: "Jola Fran Ingbo"
MPEG Stream: "Offer Rota "
MPEG Stream: "Besvarjelse Rota"

SLOWCOACH Distance Makes The Heart Grow Fondelier (Pacific Rock) 12" 9.98
We had never heard Slowcoach before, but we've learned to trust the Deathbomb Arc label, who not too long ago gave us a killer reissue of late great SF noise rockers Rrope, and now deliver this single sided 12" from syrup sipping Cali downer pop indie rockers Slowcoach, who seem to inhabit a sound that hovers right between, say Pavement and the Grifters or the Radar Brothers and Polvo, or Sparklehorse and the Swirlies, or, well, we could go on and on and on. There are hooks galore, and melodies, and all sorts of pop stuff, but all suspended in a washed out doper haze, a haze that often collapsesinto psychedelic sound collage, or abstract druggy smolder, but always stumbling back into some semblance of cough syrup pop. Way too brief, the 5 songs her clocking in at about 16 minutes, but the replayability is off the charts, and we can vouch for that, since we've already listened to this like 20 times in a row.
Be warned though, this is LIMITED TO ONLY 30 COPIES and we got a tiny handful, so grab one while you can!!!

SPACIN' Total Freedom (Agitated) cd 14.98
NOW ON CD!!!
Another batch of Deep Thuds from these Philly psych rock deadbeats, a gloriously distorted, FX drenched concoction of warped power pop, boozy blooze and twangy, spacey swagger. Pounding slabs of Stoogesy stomp meet hazy, hook heavy groovers meet hippy dippy, paisley pop, sing-along anthems. Spacin' consist of members of Birds Of Maya and the Steve Gunn Band, but this is a whole 'nother animal, one that's wasted and woozy, lo-fi and laid back, an endless bummer, lysergic jam rock fused to some sweet strain of bedroom drug pop and blasted from a broken boombox on a stoop littered with empty 40s, in front of an old crumbling old house in the sketchiest part of town.
MPEG Stream: "Over Uneasy"

SPECTRAL LORE Gnosis (I, Voidhanger) cd 14.98
REJOICE! New discs from I, Voidhanger have arrived! It's been a while since we've stocked material from our FAVORITE current metal label going, and when we did, it was gone almost immediately! So, while it's here, we have the newest release from Spectral Lore, a follow up to the double cd entitled III which we had a while back but never reviewed (and we have back in stock for those looking). On Gnosis, the lone Greek artist that writes and records all the music has really embraced the mystical, the spiritual, and the psychedelic elements of the powerful and EPIC black metal he's made up to this point. Unlike III, however, there are no vocals on Gnosis (or, if they are, they are buried in the mix), but it more than makes up for that with constantly shifting, hypnotic instrumentals that are far an above his best work to date. A definitely must for anyone into the recent spectacular release by Oranssi Pazuzu, or the sun-drenched black metal of early Alcest. Like everything else on I, Voidhanger, totally unique, simply spectacular and not to be missed!
MPEG Stream: "Dualism"
MPEG Stream: "Gnosis' Journey Through The Ages"
MPEG Stream: "A God Made Of Flesh And Consciousness"

TODESSTOSS Hirngemeer (I, Voidhanger) cd 14.98
Another new I, Voidhanger treat. Although this is the first thing we've reviewed by 'em, some of us here have long been seriously obsessive fans of weirdo, avant/experimental black metal outfit Todesstoss (which means Deathblow), and pretty much everything about this band screams "what the fuck?", and thus essentially also screams AQUARIUS! There's the name, which is of course spelled with the German Eszett (way more kvlt than a dumb old umlaut). There's the cover, which features an anthropomorphic penguin, in a cosmic robe, standing above a human brain on a plinth, all within some sort of ruins. Oh and that's just the slipcover, the actual cover art is some sort of double polar bear, with one of it's head a crazy, human toothed iron skull, and a weird tenatacled brain emerging from a bloody hole in the middle of its back, oh and there are doggy dishes for both heads, and this is all taking place in some sort of stalactite-d cave. The artwork and band photos inside the booklet get even weirder. And hell we haven't even gotten to the music yet, which appropriately enough begins with some weird spate of tappy percussion, and creepy dripping sounds, then harmonica (!!), before exploding into a furious blast of blizzard blur, but within seconds, any semblance of traditional black buzz disappears in a cloud of dramatic over the top vocals, strange industrial thrum, the production blurry and abstract, the harmonica returns, and hell, we can't really do it justice, considering the first song alone is nearly 30 minutes long, and thus goes through about a million sonic permutations, all of them ridiculous and amazing, and while there are stretches of proper black metal, they are definitely in the minority, with the rest of the track careening wildly from Devil Doll like drama, to gnarled rhythmic psychedelia, to woozy, metallic shred, to jazzy, proggy freak out. Needless to say, it's totally fucked, and completely next level bonkers.
We'd love to dig into the second song too, but that one's THIRTY FOUR minutes long, and goes through about the same number of sonic shifts, albeit, leaning a bit toward the dirtier side of the equation, but again, it's a bafflingly wild ride, and one that we imagine would have most traditional metalheads diving for the eject button. But we're guessing since you're reading the aQ list, and have made it this far in this over-long review, you might be just the sort of weirdo that this stuff is made for. The final track, super short in comparison (12 minutes) gets all sultry and slithery, a little bit electronic, and about as far removed from black metal as you could imagine, a sort of creepy cabaret, replete with woozy fretless bass, anguished Scott Walker with a lobotomy crooning, and ends up sounding like some demented Lynchian doom jazz. Needless to say, totally and unequivocally recommended.
MPEG Stream: "Verwehung"
MPEG Stream: "Narbenkafig"
MPEG Stream: "Strom Der Augenblicke"

V/A Cumbias Chichadelicas: Peruvian Psychedelic Chicha (Pharaway Sounds) 2lp 38.00
We've been waiting a while to finally get enough of this killer comp of Peruvian jams to list and rave about and finally the time has come. This double lp is jam packed with all killer/no filler psychedelic Chicha songs that just beg to be blasted loud anywhere & everywhere they are played.
If your not too familiar with Chicha music begin to think about Cumbia music that's doused with a bit more wah-wah, trippy instrumentation, and completely infectious melody. We raved many years ago about the Roots Of Chicha compilations that the Barbes label put out, but this collection ups the ante even further.
Everyone of these tracks sounds like one of the best songs on aQ favorite compilations like Psych Funk 101, Forge Your Own Chains, the Ethiopiques series or a Nuggets comp of South American surf-psych-pop. We could really go on and on about this... but every now & then we just got to say TRUST US on this one as you won't be disappointed!

WILSON, GARY You Think You Really Know Me (Feeding Tube ) lp 21.00
Our original review of this reissue (now repressed) of 1977 private press outsider funk slammed it pretty hard but some of us who started working here after the review have always loved it for it for all the same reasons the original reviewer hated it. It's extreme pathos and cringeworthy stalkerness set to funky slow jams sung by a guy with a taped up face with severe emotional damage has to be heard to be believed. Like Joe Jackson with a restraining order, you got to admit, this is pretty damn groovy.
Ariel Pink basically based his whole musical persona on Gary Wilson. And once the original reissue came out years and years ago, Wilson had a resurgence in his career releasing records on Stones Throw that are still so damn weird. Not for everyone that's for sure. But that's what makes these records interesting. So you have two differing opinions. Read on, give the sound samples a listen and decide for yourself!
Here is the original review:
If ya ain't been paying close attention, you might erroneously think that our AQ collective aesthetic runs to whatever is "weird", for the simple reason that it's "weird". But you'd be wrong. Heck, there's obviously no integrity in just being anti for anti's sake. People who're into EVERYTHING weird, regardless of quality, usually are trying to prove something about themselves, it's got nothing to do with music. So, while I can totally appreciate the weirdness of this reissue of the legendary Gary Wilson album, and its first appearance on cd, I can't fully recommend it to you... because it's pretty bad. Not "so bad it's good." This is "so bad... period!" On the other hand, Neil Strauss from the NY Times thinks it's good - he wrote that big article about Wilson that's largely responsible for the current hype and interest - so if you actually trust Strauss or whoever, then go for it. If you trust AQ, save yer money. It sounds like a syrupy "slow jams" record made by a complete dork who's kinda bitter about some failed relationship(s). There's no pleasure to be found in listening to Wilson's pitiful attempts at songwriting and performing, no joy in knowing he feels worse than you ever did. The Langley Schools cd, with the Canadian kids singing pop hits, is a great example of rock performed by amateurs who're so earnest, super touching, and poignant... and thus the Langley Schools cd is (to *some* of the AQ staff) Good Listening. But I swear, the Gary Wilson just doesn't deliver. Did someone mash Bobby Conn through the Steely Dan filter?! Sigh. The only way to convince yourself that you like this record is to look at it ironically. And that's no way to listen to music! "Irony." Feh.
This review was written by someone who has owned the Gary Wilson record for, like, seven years. Go figure.
MPEG Stream: "6.4 = Make Out"
MPEG Stream: "When You Walk Into My Dreams"
MPEG Stream: "Chromium Bitch"

WIRE, THE #386 April 2016 magazine 9.98
Another neat-o issue of this indispensable music mag from the UK. Jazz improv great Cecil Taylor is on the cover, and inside, you'll find everything from our buddy, rapper Signor Benedick The Moor to an article about a documentary about the history of sounds in video games to guitarist Mike Cooper to a primer on J Dilla. Plus all the other usual stuff - tons of reviews, columns, the Invisible Jukebox thing (put to the test: Glasgow dance music groop Golden Teacher). 98 pages which should make you a lot hipper than you were before you read 'em all.