Valium Aggelein are a side project of Duster who released two rare albums in the late '90s, both of which exhibited the same sparse slowcore-meets-space rock sound of their main group. At the same time multi-instrumentalists Clay Parton and Canaan Dove Amber were getting Duster's sound together, they were recording similar music under the name Valium Aggelein. The 1997 cassette release Dweller on the Threshold sounded like fragmented demos for Duster songs mixed with some more fully realized songs. Soon after that release, the duo teamed up with drummer Jason Albertini and were able to improvise more easily in a band setting. The next album was recorded at the same time as Duster's classic Stratosphere, only the songs here were largely improvised and sans singing. Hier Kommt Der Schwartze Mond was issued to little fanfare in 1998, even as Duster made some tiny ripples with their record. The trio didn't issue any more recordings under the Valium Aggelein name, and Duster broke up not long after. All three musicians continued to work together, or at least travel in the same musical circles, over the ensuing decades, but their work as Valium Aggelein was forgotten. At least until the late 2010s, when the music of Duster connected with a new generation of music fans and their old LPs and CDs started fetching outlandish sums on the secondhand market. Hier Kommt Der Schwartze Mond was caught up in the undertow and was soon also selling for exorbitant prices. The Numero Group noticed and released a Duster box set titled Capsule Losing Contact in 2019, then in 2020 issued the complete works of Valium Aggelein under the title Black Moon. ~ Tim Sendra, Rovi

Valium Aggelein

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