Music from United Kingdom

As far as the history of power electronics goes, few acts have maintained as much interest and activity as Sutcliffe Jügend. The duo of Paul Taylor and Kevin Tompkins has released crucial early recordings on labels as revered as Come Organization and Broken Flag. The group has resumed actions under the Sutcliffe Jügend banner with a return album, This is the Truth last year also on Hospital Productions. While that record pleased fans old and new with the power electronics style SJ helped pioneer…

Recorded and otherwise applied to various surfaces and objects at the G*D facility, Reykjavík, during the glorious winter of 2002- 3, assisted by various woodland creatures and several nymphs. pract .dept. - a: Mxll, b: J. Jóhannsson, c: Bibbi published by Freibank. Unmitigated joy to them: his Hundleyness of Briandom, Ditterich Von Euler-Donnersperg, and with more tapping feet and folded arms, Thee Ditz, who is responsible for background material visible herein. and on, for that matter. Dedicat…

For the past eight years Andrew Paine and Richard Youngs have met on almost every Sunday and recorded music. Mauve Dawn is the result of ten meetings during 2004. Its nine tracks feature processed epinette des vosges, glockenspiel, vintage keyboards and guitars, alongside granularly-synthesized household objects hacked together with resonated voices and filtered bells in a stereo field heavy on ring modulation. One part of the Mauve trilogy, this is an instrumental album of classic length.

Debut album from the duo of Richard Youngs and Tirath Singh Nirmala (nee John Clyde-Evans) that has the pair creating a bucolic minimalist meditation. Side one interchangeably features hammered strings, gong/cymbal washes, droning vocals, and breathed shackuhachi/flutes. The second side leads with a melodious encounter before delving further into a glimmering psychedelia with sawed strings, fluttering reed organ and electronic drift. The results resemble a non-western approach to traditional mus…

The full, original 1981 Return of the Giant Slits album + a bonus CD that features ALL the archived dub versions and an American radio interview conducted at the time that was subsequently used by CBS for an ultra-rare promo disc. Including new cover art and two of the classic photos by Anton Corbijn from the NME magazine cover session. The 1981 second and final Slits studio album features the same line-up as their first album, Cut: Ari Up, Tessa Pollit and Viv Albertine. This record has often b…

Long out of print, very rare nowadays - The Great Learning was one of British composer Cornelius Cardew's most important works, a series of seven "paragraphs" with text from the writings of Confucius and scored for generally large numbers of both trained and untrained performers. The original productions of this piece, in fact, served as the genesis of the legendary pro-amateur Scratch Orchestra. This 2000 release includes three of the paragraphs, two from the 1971 Deutsche Grammophon album that…

Second LP from The Work, seldom seen for sale nowadays, with dense compositions, high quality, powerful recordings that explore the fringes of rock; pop fragments, hypnotic repetitions and highly evolved arrangements coupled with a fine exploration of sonorities and techniques, this has a strong and unique musical fingerprint, always surprising while retaining its centre in performance. Besides collecting what could arguably be their finest songs, this disk displays the group's unusual sense of …

rare original first 7" by the British underground pop/prog/jazz/avant-garde label WOOF Records, that was originally set up by Tim Hodgkinson and Bill Gilonis; the music is art rock at his best, not reliant on melody, with touches of jazz, loads of avant-garde noise, and moments of just general wierdness.    

A listener familiar with the pedigree of the albums of Brian Eno might assume that the Virgin/Astralwerks release More Music for Films is merely a repackaging of Music for Films, Vol. 2, a bonus album included within the LP boxed set Working Backwards. Such an assumption would be incorrect, as More Music for Films represents a new spin on a variety of soundtrack material made by Eno in the years 1976-1983, including some tracks drawn from Music for Films, Vol. 2, others from Eno Box I: Instrumen…

Originally released as a limited-edition (500 copies) LP in 1976 which was sent to a selection of filmmakers for possible inclusion in their work 1, the commercial Music for Films release was expanded to include a number of pieces for, as Eno put it, "possible use as soundtracks to ‘imaginary’ films". In fact, excerpts from the album (particularly, "Sparrowfall 1") did appear in at least one movie, John Woo's A Better Tomorrow. The album is a loose compilation of material from the period 1975 to…

Unlike Music for Films, the music for Apollo: Atmospheres and Soundtracks was entirely written for a specific film project—a documentary about the NASA Apollo lunar missions, by director Al Reinert. Additionally, by this time, Eno had found a sympathetic partner in Canadian Daniel Lanois, having already worked with Lanois on the 80 collaboration with Harold Budd, Ambient 2: The Plateaux of Mirror and the 82 release, Ambient 4: On Land. Lanois would bring an equally vivid imagination, and a more …

Ambient 4: On Land is even more about experience and less about conventional listening; music that is meant more to be felt than heard. Music that, through its combinations of found sounds processed and placed in well-considered places in the stereo image - this is a recording that is best listened to in headphones - evokes strong imagery of places real and imagined.Brian Eno even references earlier works, extracting bits and pieces and subsuming them into a new whole. Eno compares this process …

very rare, long out of print studio recording from 1982. This marks the recording debut of John Tilbury (piano) in the group, plus the now reunited core of Prévost and Keith Rowe (guitar, electronics). Absolutely stunning improvisational "noise" from a very serious standpoint ensemble. One copy only available, new and unplayed

rare original LP, recorded live in London on 1/10/87. Prévost, Rowe, Tilbury, and Rohan de Saram (cello). The organic control of sound on this disc is spectacular; pretty much a must for serious listeners worldwide. One copy only available, new and unplayed

It’s this musical whisper that is amplified on Oceanic Feeling-Like, as Italian based musician Mike Cooper and Australia’s Chris Abrahams unite for the first time to create what could be described as a picturesque horizon of melodic ocean swell. Stretching out wide, Oceanic Feeling-Like is generously coloured by Cooper’s unique approaches to the guitar and Abrahams' distinctive piano motions. Both bring a wealth of technique and improvised flare, creating a series of island-like compositions tha…

Japan edition. Faust was among the most adventurous and creative German bands of the '70s, and after disappearing for a decade and a half, they reunited in the '90s and made several startlingly good albums. Today, drummer Werner 'Zappi' Diermaier and bassist Jean-Hervé Peron are the only original members, joined by Amaury Cambuzat from the band Ulan Bator. Nurse With Wound, formed three decades ago, is the brainchild of Steven Stapleton, now augmented with Colin Potter. NWW recordings are notori…

"Lest We Forget" is a collection compiled from the earliest recordings by Nocturnal Emissions, a group founded by Nigel Ayers, his brother Daniel Ayers and Caroline K in 1980. It comprises of material previously only available on cassettes as well as tracks recorded under their earlier name, The Pump. The Nocturnal Emissions were active in what has been known as “cassette culture” and explored the medium of underground cassette exchange in parallel with their better known vinyl releases and live…

Nigel Ayers’ most accessible emission? The glut of his ‘band’s prolific history has generally been a full-scale assault upon the senses, via either dingy slabs of noise or near-pretty industrial musique concrete. Stoneface operates on many levels, a set of gruelling, scraping, yet strangely attractive organic sounds that reveal numerously coloured layers with successive listens. Recorded in 1988, these nineteen sonic morsels play with near-baroque tendencies, devolved factory rhythms, spiritual …

Muslimgauze are easily the most prolific electronics outfit on the experimental underground scene. And while they release CDs in bunches, Muslimgauze's output never sinks below absolutely brilliant. The basic formula is relatively simple: lift some Arabic street music, sample it, loop it, attach a small explosive, and detonate. The result: an incredibly rich pastiche of wind-blown, dubbed-out trance music that is at once edgy but calm, aggressive but soothing. "Gulf" is a peaceful, laconic 20-mi…

Shorter than many of Muslimgauze's 1990s albums - 13 untitled songs over 45 minutes - Azzazin, originally released as part of the limited-edition subscription series, feels more like a collection of random experiments than a cohesive piece of work per se. If not something that would intrigue the casual listener, the hard-core fan will likely find something of interest on the various tracks here. Starting with an extremely minimal opening number - it's no surprise Finnish experimental duo Pan Son…