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**CD edition** With the wake of his blessed collab with The Congos and his 'Ancient Romans' side still shimmering in our memory, Cameron Stallones returns from his mystic regressions to present a sixth solo LP as Sun Araw. With his return comes a startlingly fresh-faced clarity to his sound, as though millenia of metaphysical sonic travel have dislodged the overbuild of dusty amp wax and really let some cosmic sunshine thru. It's perhaps also down to some assistance in the final process from Pet…

Delicious album of stoned psyche from Camerone Stallones, his first solo full length since last year's massive 'On Patrol'. In the meantime he's released some well received and diverse collaborations with Matthewdavid and Eternal Tapestry, but really, he's at his very best when left to own devices and free to wander bleary eyed and dopey through the sun baked dub soundscapes of his mind. It's so hard to escape any imagery of bacchanalian dream sequences given the sleeve and track titles, …

On Patrol, originally released in 2010, is a double album in two parts, and the fourth full length album from Sun Araw. An album for heavy-steamin' late nights in the city, inter-dimensional back alleys, ghost cabs; it creeps and tunes in on a much darker, sparser, and more classically minded channel than its predecessors: dark and deep steam-vent ruminations on Phil Cohran, lenticular objects, and fried Hot 92.3 R&B slow-jams. A cold bug makes a real 'live wire.

"Orton Socket is mainly comprised of main-man and mouthpiece Rob Mazurek, known for blowing horns (as well as eardrums and minds etcetera) on a variety of efforts by Stereolab, Isotope 217, his own Chicago Underground Duo, and some other folks you probably have’nt heard of. Plus Rob's done a series of records under his own name. See, he's been a spotlight kid for years now. But for 99 Explosions, Rob has reemerged incognito, armed with synthesizer and powerbook, wearing the shimmering cloak of O…

Huge Tip! In the Merry Month of May is the final studio recording of the late, great Tony Conrad, and the first duo release with Jennifer Walshe, one of Conrad’s most important collaborators in the final decade of his life. Befitting these two absurdly gifted hell-raisers, this is a wild, improvisatory flaying of song, with Walshe’s clarion voice at the heart of the enterprise. The sheer sonic force of opener “In the Merry Month of May” recalls the ecstatic charge of Conrad’s Slapping Pythagoras…

The first duo performance between David Grubbs and Manuel Mota, the mysterious Portguese guitar legend; a real-time, documentary feel in which athematic, non-repeating musical gestures are rendered with an extreme sensitivity to microscopic soundworlds brought about by fingertips, strings, and tube amplifiers."Smoky seance of barely there strums and possible psychokinesis, ideal for fans of Loren Connors..." Boomkat

Dust & Mirrors’ is the second full-length album by the trio of Andrea Belfi (drums, percussion, electronics), David Grubbs (electric guitar, piano, voice), and Stefano Pilia (electric guitar). It follows 2010’s ‘Onrushing Cloud’ LP and finds the trio confidently taking stabs in a number of opposed directions. It dramatically widens the terrain in which the group operates. Between albums, the three musicians worked together on David Grubbs’s 2013 album ‘The Plain Where The Palace Stood’, and took…

David's debut on vinyl as a solo guitar improviser. Unhurried probing through spare themes for electric guitar and nylon-string acoustic. "Strange to say, but Borough of Broken Umbrellas is David Grubbs's first record of solo guitar improvisations, a profoundly unhurried probing (sometimes worrying, like a tongue and a tooth) of a handful of gorgeously spare themes. It divides its sides between two long (c. 12') tracks for electric guitar and nylon-string guitar. Comparisons are unnecessary…

*Dense drones embedded with stuttering, spitted fragments of poetry. very abstract and oblique but engaging.* "The third collaboration from poet Howe and musician Grubbs. A soundworld that germinates wildly from this most multiple and heterogenous of Howe's poems. Real-performance of the fragment-strewn text is subject to Grubbs' further deformations, scattering and layerings."Frolic Architecture is the third collaboration from poet Susan Howe and musician David Grubbs. It follows Souls of the …

Adult guitar is a startling anthology of twenty unreleased tracks from Noël Akchoté's first twenty-one years of recording. Adult guitar (it is twenty-one years, after all) is the first record to attempt to represent the breadth of Noël's music. The project began when Noël dumped ten hours of wonderfully heterogeneous archival recordings in the hands of David Grubbs, who served as project editor and created a number of pieces from the raw material of live recordings. The resulting collection incl…

Impro-Micro-Acoustique is a meeting across generations and genre. Composer Luc Ferrari, one of the progenitors of musique concrete and a pioneer of electroacoustic music, has previously written scores for improvising musicians. (One of these, 'Tautologos 3' -- in an explosive 1970 performance by Konstantin Simonovitch's ensemble -- appears on an earlier Blue Chopsticks release.) But prior to Impro-Micro-Acoustique, Ferrari himself had never played the role of an improviser. Several years ago, Fe…

What a pleasant surprise! The Swedish multi-reed maestro, he of the coruscatingly wild fluteophone attacks, turns to the relatively calm and linear world of Steve Lacy and finds a very happy medium in this solo release. While he treats Lacy's deadpan and deceptively simple melodies with clear respect, he uses them as jumping off points for his own idiosyncratic deconstructions. On "Deadline," he navigates into a territory of ultra-soft percussive clicks and taps, creating a fascinating spatial f…

In the wake of the acclaimed Inland See, the on-growing analog ecosystem being animated for ten albums now by Bitchin Bajas boasts new high energy views. “Isle Peaks” speaks of directions in beats of time, weather and the heart to wherever coast they found themselves when they got it all laid out. Sourced from Inland See sessions, these cuts were subjected to further edits and tweaks, with electroacoustic textures of sampled kalimba, field recordings, autoharp and EWI to activate and transport d…

What might appear to be the most unlikely collaboration of 2024 proves also to be one of the most invigorating listens of the year! Shackleton & Six Organs of Admittance are in full aural/metaphysical alignment in their mutual effort to become Jinxed by Being. On first listen, it becomes immediately clear that this fusion of Shackleton's bass-heavy cosmic dread and Six Organs' ritual folksong makes total sense. Longtime listeners know that both Shackleton and Six Organs of Admittance have been u…

Tip! Early acoustic guitar improv performances from the Bhutanese expat, who’d come to Asheville, NC to study in 2000 and discovered worlds of anarcho-punk and avant garde such as he’d only dreamed. Having made recordings of his newly-located improvisational conception, he intuited a desire to go deeper in his explorations of the recorded sound of the guitar, melding and colliding traditional music with his feeling for the range of textures within.

Master of myriad styles, Sir Rick Bishop takes in baroque, flamenco, surf, and harder to place fusions of phantasmagoric sound design, Gaelic folk and Indian Raga, and more lysergic expression in this bounty of a new album. Five years after Tangier Sessions, Sir Richard Bishop, we presume, is back from his travels around the world. With Oneiric Formulary, he’s dug deeper into his bag of extra-musical gestures from the eternal and unknowable, along with a few sounds we might recognize, all transm…

New Hexadic music from outside our native understanding of ti me and space! Features underground masters of sound Moon Duo, Richard Youngs, Meg Baird & Charlie Saufley, Tashi Dorji, Jenks Miller, Phil Legard, and Stephen O'Malley, Tim Wyskida & Marc Urselli.

A moment that fell down in the life of Haley Fohr on January 22, 2016 — now in album form! Redefining and realizing the goals that were set to allow Haley become Circuit des Yeux and Circuit des Yeux to become Haley. 

Several years ago, after tiring of the predictable patterns he sensed himself settling into as a guitar player, Ben Chasny of Six Organs of Admittance decided to design a theoretical framework that would force his hands into different positions. Chasny distributed a deck of poker cards in a circular array of sets of six, corresponding to the notes of the guitar. The relative positions of the cards gave Chasny a "tonal field" in which to operate, as well as a set of notes from which to pick, some…

Husband and wife team Johnima and Kalassu Wintergate are Lightstorm: globetrotting musical collaborators retransmitting messages of love from their teacher and Avatar Sathya Sai Baba: authentic 1970’s hippies on a spiritual space-journey. Most of the material gathered here was originally released on a small scale, so it is satisfying to see these oddities compiled and made available by Drag City. Since 1973, the Lightstorm discography has been issued under a variety of aliases (Creation E…

"The tone of the guitar and Sir Richard's gentle, loving touch with it hold forth from the first moment of Tangier Sessions, sitting clear and true in the home-recorded night air above the city. The album sequence is the precise order of the songs as they were conceived and recorded. Rick's all over the neck in the early going while sorting through the dynamics of the instrument -- in fact, guitarophiles, the first couple of songs feature Sir Richard Bishop playing without a plectrum for the fir…

Al Cisneros is no stranger to the deep meditations of a minimalist, sub-sonic song. We've all been totally faced by the ritual low-end thunder his band, OM, bestow as gospel both live and on record on the regular, a sound source which can hardly be described as minimal yet never needs more than a smattering of accompaniment beyond its usual, steady drumming. Perhaps a bit of guitar here, some keys there, or maybe just some extra tambo to provide color, but first and foremost, you get full…

Drag City drops the sixth and latest David Grubbs pop album, The Plain Where the Palace Stood, which finds David once again twining together the diverse strands of his vast interests. Working with Andrea Belfi (drums, electronics) and Stefano Pilia (guitar) - plus Attila Faravelli on electronics - creates a sympathetic groupthink that David expects more and greater from in the years to come. The welcome return of his distinctive overdriven guitar tone is a highlight of the record. And C. S…

Cosmic, heavy amplified rock drops and ripples, auras radiate and expand into cloud forms, through which lightning bolts. Tides rise, the moons wax upon a place somewhere between Link Wray, Hex-era Earth and early Tangerine Dream. The echoes return, leaving a trail that blows and drifts, creating a separate piece. Ensemble Pearl are Atsuo, William Herzog, Michio Kurihara and Stephen O'Malley. Their debut album also features the elemental forces of Eyvind Kang and Timba Harris. These playe…

"The Venom P. Stinger retrospective is on. One of the roughest groups of the '80s is back in print on vinyl and for the first time ever on CD, and still nice and hard and rough and wild on either format. File under: punk rock/noise rock/free-of-constraints rock. If you think of Venom P. Stinger simply as the proving ground for 2/3rds of the Dirty Three first, then you're seriously missing it, and fuck you."

Alasdair Roberts continues to do his bit for Scottish folk heritage on a fyne suite of augmented standards and new songs accompanied by his pals. Alasdair brings his undoubted charm, skill and imagination to ten songs ranging from celebratory elegies ('The Merry Wake') to doom-laden laments ('The Laverock in the Blackthorn'), distilling the passion, pain and yearning of hundreds of years of tradition with a timeless voice, perfectly summed up by fellow countryman and poet Robin Robertson: …

Stop right there, hands in the air! If you want to know what Magik Markers think is good for you, you'll Surrender to the Fantasy. For this long-desired alpus, they've been working in threes and stuff. Triangles. The hermetic trifecta of knowledge, Christ and the two thieves, Alvin and the Chipmunks, and the original tagline of the Markers' symbol: '3 down, no to go.' Meaning, these three get it and literally no one else needs to, 'cept the record-buying public, tra la la, ha ha ha ha. STTF (nev…

Ben Chasny has spent many years at this point perfecting his very personal vision of the American landscape. With his early LPs he managed to grab a groundswell of support for his distinctly lo-fi recordings, and since hitting the Drag City label with the breathtaking 'School of Flower' he has managed to extend his vision to countless others. 'Asleep on the Floodplain' continues his exploration, and while it doesn't change up the formula too much (apart from the odd analogue synth blurt here and…

"When witch-gods collide, it might sound something like this. Six Organs of Admittance...Richard Bishop...Chris Corsano. Riders of the apocalypse, it's them vs. us. After absorbing their über-holy dynamo, you'll be prepared to join up with these wraiths, making it all of us against...well, whomever's fool enough to stand in our way. To evil! Rangda's been building up behind the scenes for some time now. As label mates and members of an exclusive mutual admiration society, Sir Rick …

Young Scotsman Alasdair Roberts is an old hand at songcraft -- and not just his own, but the songs of the ancients, the near-ancients and their friends. Over the past decade that he's been singing music in his own name (after graduating from the Appendix Out youth brigade), he's made a habit out of recording songs of his own and traditional songs with an equal amount of investment and urgency. After all, it's all music, always deserving of everything we have to give. Following 2009's de…

CD edition: Luminous Night is the first set of new Six Organs Of Admittance material to leap forth from Ben Chasnys' cerebral cortex in 18 months, and what a joy it is. With the release of odds-and-sods collection RTZ earlier in the year there to bridge the gap between 2007s Shelter From The Ash it doesn't seem like he's been away for long per se but for serious Chasny-heads a new album is something to get pretty excited about and with his other musical outlet Comets On Fire either on extended h…

Listen through Sir Richard Bishop’s six readily available solo albums, and you get the picture that the worldview of the former Sun City Girls’ guitarist is not only complex, but also more than a little ambiguous. What exactly is Richard Bishop? A dealer in the exotic? A dabbler in esoteric mysticism? A “traveling salesman”? The Freak of Araby doesn’t make Bishop’s worldview any simpler for us, but it does clarify it some. He is, first and foremost, a traveler, picking up inspiration as he roams…

A beautiful acoustic-based record featuring careful, melancholy arrangements in the tradition set by his famous previous record - but with a few unpredictable musical touches. Seconds weaves black threads of lyrical reflection into its sleeve in the short-lived Higgins tradition. His was never a hippie-dippy perspective - back in the day, his songs featured a thoughtful, but worldweary, occasionally even paranoid perspective. Accompanied by his fellow travelers (including a couple Red Hash playe…

For this latest album Caledonian folk impresario Alasdair Roberts teams up with expected collaborators like Alex Neilson (whose drumming and percussion work has illuminated many a free-folk record over recent years, a few of which Roberts has been involved with) and more unusual contributors such as Niko-Matti Ahti of Fonal's Kiila. Perhaps more than ever, Roberts' music invites comparisons to Bonnie 'Prince' Billy, traveling sufficiently far from the trad songwriting fold to be thought of as 'a…

2026 repress on vinyl; Deluxe 3LP box version with an 8-page, large-format lyric booklet and printed inner sleeves. For various reasons Have One On Me, Joanna Newsom's new triple-album defies the notion of fast-turnaround appraisals. Apart from sheer abundance of music here, it's also very dense and scrupulously laboured over, not only by Newsom herself but a select band of fellow musicians and arrangers - not to mention ace mixing engineers Jim O'Rourke, and Noah Georgeson (best known for his w…

Classic proto-punk from 1970s Detroit. Raw with little polish, the record showcases the organic power relationships within the trio of brothers. The Hackneys were first influenced by soul & funk music but it all changed when they saw Iggy and the Stooges. Inspired by The Who, Alice Cooper & Led Zeppelin; the brothers finally see their first full length release, remastered & ready for the world to hear.

“Ridges and creases / high on the middle forehead / The right temple near the eyebrow / A small ridge under the right eye / The right side of the tip of the nose / The opening of the right nostril / The middle lower lip / The inner ear of the right ear.” Can you tell who it is yet? It’s George W. Bush, of course, or at least part of his head, as seen (or rather heard) in the second of five “American portraits” in words and music by legendary experimental rock outfit the Red Krayola, in collabora…

; printed innersleeve with lyrics. Before Balf Quarry landed on my desk, I figured the dirtiest thing in Connecticut was Chris Dodd's browser history. Not so. Among other things — like guitar tones that buzz around like contact-high June bugs, Elisa Ambrogio's slack vocals wavering between coy calls and willfully distant snarls, and a production value so low and dense you feel you're listening to them from the dining room above their rehearsal space — Hartford natives the Magik Markers are one o…

Blow UP record of the month "A step into the void' is how David Grubbs describes An Optimist Notes The Dusk, his first solo album since 2004's A Guess At The Riddle. Much the same way that each of Gastr del Sol's albums sought to avoid precedent and to model a world in which nothing should be taken for granted, An Optimist Notes The Dusk steps into the void. Nothing necessitates -- it's all built from the ground up, and at each step of the way it could have been built differently. David Grubbs' …

Oh, the difference an "o" makes. While Fingerpainting spoke of creation, Fingerpointing jabs you in the eye. These are Jim O'Rourke's alternate mixes, made from the same "paint" as the original release, but the colors are a different shade. 2008 release. "Free form freak out is dead! Long live free form freak out! Sounds are building blocks, say The Red Krayola, again and, now, again. '60s The Red Krayola began recording because posterity asked for it. Today, they proffer their latest sensat…