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Drone Islands - Land Rising
**200 copies** Pitchfork Media and Allmusic journalist Mark Richardson defined drone music thus: "The vanishing-point music created by drone elders Phill Niblock and, especially, LaMonte Young is what happens when a fixation on held tones reaches a tipping point. Timbre is reduced to either a single clear instrument or a sine wave, silence disappears completely, and the base-level interaction between small clusters of "pure" tone becomes the music's content. This kind of work takes what typicall…
Witchcraft & Black Magic In the United Kingdom
**200 copies** "Witchcraft has had a fascinating and turbulent history in the UK. Through periods of persecution and prejudice, it has survived to the present day and many people still practise the tradition now. From the 7th Century onwards, attitudes towards the practise began to change. During the medieval period, fears over so-called ‘black magic’ began to emerge. This referred to the power of witchcraft to bring harm to others. An association was also drawn between witchcraft and the devil.…
Primordial Lift
Primordial Lift was originally released in 2000 and is a recording of a performance Oliveros made with David Grubbs on Harmonium and Tony Conrad on electric violin among others. Of course, the result is transcendent and throws your mind across the room – thick waves of sound and dense drones surround you as you listen and the instruments become one wall of pulsating sound. Some of you might know Oliveros from her minimalist work with the Deep Listening Band, which she founded – this material how…
Ethnic Minority Music of Southern China
The fifth Sublime Frequencies volume in Laurent Jeanneau's amazing documentation of vanishing indigenous music of the rural Asian frontiers, this CD focuses on ethnic minority groups of Southern China. Presented here are 17 tracks of supremely infectious vocals and folkloric instrumentals played on a wide variety of local traditional instruments. The centerpiece of this collection is the 13-minute "Do Djui Atsei" (track 5), an absolutely epic male and female group choral vocal piece which is imp…
Earthforce
In process of stocking. Ultra rare mid-70s UK acid folk rock recordings. Features sitar, moog, acoustic and electric guitars, assorted percussion instruments to create a Popul Vuh like soundscape. If you can imagine the perfect blend of Eastern trance/psych and English hippy acid folk rock, this would be it. Very cool and freaky. Earthforce were an offshoot of Ebling Mis and Oa Band formed by Steve Bayfield. Hailing from the UK, the band was influenced by a wide variety of music including Englis…
Ailleurs
Dominique Blanc-Francard’s “Ailleurs” is trippy and weird… and yet… the songs are catchy and the album rocks out. Fuzzy guitar, chunky drums, weird effects, a thick mix of layers of sound — all tasty ingredients. Pink Floyd meets T-Rex? It’s a terrific recipe, which surely must describe other albums? Even so, we can’t think of another album that sounds quite like “Ailleurs.”Without realizing it, you’ve probably already listened to Dominique Blanc-Francard’s work — as a sound engineer. DBF (as hi…
Key To Nowhere
Cosmic righteousness from Brother Ahh – aka Robert Northern – best known for his work with Sun Ra, but a force behind some wonderfully soulful records of his own! This album's one of Ahh's later works – self-released in 1983, with a conception that's fuller than his earlier works – almost in an Alice Coltrane spiritual mode, with tracks that emphasize consciousness, healing, well being, and awareness. Ahh plays flute and French horn on the album – and other instrumentation includes percussion by…
Eros In Arabia
This year has been an incredible period for avant-garde, Minimalist, New Age, ambient, and electronic reissues. One after another, many of the most coveted and rare LPs from these movements have emerged from the shadows. While each of these movements had a tendency to avoid easy categorization, the reissue market has largely veered toward those whose location can be easily understood, offering less attention to those members whose work fell into the spaces between. With their fourth release sinc…
Shub Niggurath
Available previously only as a private cassette release, this Shub Niggurath reissue features the bands very 1982 first recordings. While the influence of Magma, Art Zoyd and Univers Zero are strongly in evidence at various points along these five long tracks, Shub Niggurath took it all several steps further in every direction making them one of the most extreme and uncompromising bands of the mid-80s French avant-garde scene; and while this demo was never intended to be an official release, the…
Pays Noir
Previously unreleased, the three tracks on Pays Noir come from recording sessions held at the same time as those for the cult album No Man's Land (FFL 026LP), produced by Jef Gilson in 1976, and published on vinyl by Souffle Continu Records in 2017. Singled out at the time of its release by Actuel, Rock & Folk, and Melody Maker, the tabula rasa of No Man's Land is the result of free-flowing experiments born of chance, if the two musicians are to be believed. Indeed, their approach to free im…
Aphelion
This debut release by the regular working trio of Dave Rempis, Joshua Abrams, and Avreeayl Ra is a perfect example of what makes Chicago such a fertile breeding ground for improvised music; three musicians of widely varying ages, backgrounds, playing experiences, and musical interests join forces to deliver moments of both sublime beauty and volcanic energy, continually tempered by the seamless narrative momentum that they weave together in a seemingly effortless way. Although the trio has only …
Nocturnal Earthworm Stew
* 2021 Stock* Nocturnal Earthworm Stew is a glorious experiment in electronic music, capturing the vitality and early curiosity of the 1970s. An earlier press statement called it "Serious headphone music made under the influence of Stockhausen, John Cage, Ornette Coleman, Stravinsky, Frank Zappa, Weather Report, Charles Ives and others." The influence of prog and space rock is pronounced, and contributions from Canadian prog legends Nash the Slash and Martin Deller (of FM) solidify Nocturnal's p…
Fragile
**2021 Stock** The rarest, and I would dare to say best, folk/psych album from Peter Howell and John Ferdinando, musical brainchildren behind Ithaca, Agincourt, Alice Through the Looking Glass, and Tomorrow Come Someday. This fifth Howell/Ferdinando album had just been completed in or around 1974 when the partnership came to an end. Howell had been working at the BBC as a studio manager since 1970 (he’d provided a stiff upper lip voiceover for John Peels Top Gear shows), but he was now offered a…
Nuestra Soledad / Vera
* 2021 Stock* It was—and is—almost impossible to categorize Vera Sienra’s musical style, but we’ll try: wistful songs with the world-weariness of Fado, and the pulsating sadness of the bossa nova. Her powerful and unique tone of voice, plus the softness of her guitar, have always been an unmistakable trademark. Listening to the songs of Vera’s debut album (from 1969), few people believed that those mature melodies were created by the beautiful and timid blonde who could be seen on their black & …
Lord Krishna Von Goloka
In 1973, Rolf Ulrich Kaiser's visionary powers acted as a catalyst for an authentic combination of acid, music and spirituality: the mystical LSD-fueled musical project Lord Krishna Von Goloka. For this adventure into Indian and Oriental mythologies and legends, Kaiser asked esoteric Swiss artist (he was a friend of Giger's), poet, specialist on Alpine folklore, and friend of Timothy Leary, Sergius Golowin, to join a group of musicians including Klaus Schulze and members of Wallenstein and Witth…
Maison Rose
She had been part of a traditional "antique folk" movement in France in the late 60's & recorded 8 albums w/musicians from this scene before this last album, recorded in '76. Certainly, the avant garde edge lurking beneath the simple folkiness puts in mind the explorations of Brigitte Fontaine w/her sometime musical voyager Areski. Her music has its own deeply ethereal quality, & the album itself has its own magic spell to cast that renders comparison w/other albums unimportant in the end.
Michael Oosten
* 2021 Stock * Keeping a band together was difficult in the late 1960’s. Tough too, because Michael Oosten was writing songs that veered away from pop-song structures. There was also the relative ease and lack of responsibility required for hauling around a guitar. So, Oosten took off, with a Martin guitar in tow, playing coffeehouses and clubs across the country. By the end of 1973, he was ready to record an LP—five psychedelic folk/rock tracks, ranging from the brightly smiling ‘Sunny Day’ to …
Top Soul
* 2021 Stock * Impossible to find jazz/soul/funk monster by Fusión, issued in Chile in 1975 by ALBA (ALD-041)—a fulsome combination of funk, electric jazz, and soul, with Latin roots. Bassist Enrique Luna had lived and studied art in New York, and knew first-hand the last, avant-garde years of John Coltrane, and Miles Davis’ mutation from hard bop trendsetter into an electric jazz pioneer; Matias Pizarro had appeared on the scene in the mid-60s as a young pianist of outstanding technical ability…
Mexico
Along with the two records by Nurse With Wound favorites Moving Gelatine Plates, Ergo Sum's weird and wonderful album Mexico is an unusual portal into the intense creativity of early 1970s French music. True, the bands are not musically similar; yet these three albums are distinguished not only by their instrumental richness, but by their unceasing sense of adventure. We'd go so far to say that Ergo Sum presents one of the most distinctive experiences in a rock idiom (apart from Zeuhl music jugg…
Daily Dance
After meeting at a Stooges/MC5 concert, drummer Bob Thompson and guitarist Doug Snyder met one fine day in October 1972 in Thompson's kitchen and bashed out this set of fiery improvisations, seemingly influenced as much by Iggy's proto-punk moves as John Coltrane's whole sheets of sound ethos; the result is a mythical frenzy of distorted guitar and improvised drums, creating walls of psychedelic noise; its sound is unparalleled for its time, preceding its closest kin, New York's no-wave explosio…