In 1985 I was in Colorado Springs, which is really tiny city if you know it, and at this point my life is totally focussed on finding weird record stores and buying weird records. I'm a weird record maggot. I'm going in every record store in Colorado Springs and it's all mainstream. I keep asking, is there any record store around that sells weird records? Oh you gotta go to this one.. I finally find this little hole-in-the-wall record store, way the fuck outta town, it's got like Syd Barrett picture discs and I'm like, oh finally! I spend an hour going through this store and I'm just not finding what I want, so I go up to the counter and say, excuse me, what is the weirdest record in this whole store? And they all look at each other without saying a word and he reaches under the counter and he pulls out our black album! I said, no shit! That's me! (laughs) I mean it wasn't even for sale, they didn't want to put it out!

Thomas Ankersmit / Jim O' Rourke
WEERZIN / OSCILLATORS AND GUITARS
Tochnit Aleph

Not a collaboration but a split LP released last October featuring Berlin-based saxophonist / electronician Thomas Ankersmit and Jim O'Rourke, who Ankersmit first crossed paths with when he was an exchange student in New York in 1999 (though they have numerous friends / playing partners in common, including Kevin Drumm and Günter Müller). The cover photograph by Alexandra Leykauf shows a sailor staring at a tangle of ropes and cables dredged up on the deck of a ship, as if wondering how he'd ever unravel them, and it's a rather appropriate image for both the people behind the Tochnit Aleph label and Ankersmit himself, neither being exactly forthcoming with information. Ankersmit's "Weerzin" is 18'42" of superbly tense yet tensile electronic music (true, saxophone is credited in the instrumentation along with computer, Serge and EMS synthesizers, but Ankersmit's sax never sounded like a sax in the first place), a tingle of inscrutable but rather wonderful high frequency information gradually settling into a drone of mounting intensity. To complement it, the deckhands at Tochnit Aleph have landed another fine catch of hitherto unreleased O'Rourke back catalogue (seems there's still plenty to trawl in, and if it's all as good as this and the Headz CD reviewed here last month we're in for a treat) in the form of "Oscillators and Guitars", which dates from 1992. It's the kind of rock solid power drone plus guitar shimmer that made it to Alan Licht's fabled Minimalist Top Ten, and could sit happily on your shelves next to Licht's own Sink The Aging Process. Needless to say, it hasn't aged a bit, either. Excellent stuff, strongly recommended.

Borbetomagus
SNUFF JAZZ
Agaric

Two of these four tracks, "ABC" and "DC", recorded in the ABC No Rio performance space in New York's Lower East Side on November 24th 1988, were previously available on an LP of the same name, another ("BBC") made it to a 1990 cassette accompanying an obscure Japanese fanzine, and one, "CBC", is released here for the first time. Hardcore Borbeto fans will, no doubt, already have followed the instructions in Michael Hanke's liner notes to the letter – "remove all other living critters from the house, pour yourself a double single-malt scotch, turn the volume of your stereo to TWELVE, and enjoy as your ears are acid-etched" – and those of you who have never had the, erm, pleasure of experiencing Snuff Jazz are strongly urged to do likewise. What's that? You don't drink whisky? You bloody well will when hear this. Superlatives abound in the Borbeto universe, but for my money this could be the nastiest thing they've ever done, maybe because there's very little low end from Donald Miller's guitar to balance the upper register fingernails-on-blackboard screech of Jim Sauter and Don Dietrich's saxophones. At tweeter-shredding volume, listening becomes truly painful. Has it really been 20 years since this rabid, screaming vicious monster was unleashed on humanity? It hasn't aged a bit. But good single malt has, so find yourself a 20-year-old bottle and raise a glass.