dR
"By the time you read this Jerome Noetinger is no longer the boss/face/director of Metamkine, the French mail-order for all sorts of unusual music, music along the lines of what we write about, in case you might be wondering where to purchase any (http://www.metamkine.com/ and no we don’t get paid for this ad). After many years of making parcels Noetinger and his pals decided it was time for a new face (say hello to Franck Laplaine) and now Noetinger can work more on his music. His work has been…
A Little Electronic Milky Way of Sound
**US import** Ian Fenton’s Frozen Reeds label finally unveil this epic, years-in-the-making the release of Roland Kayn’s fourteen-hour masterpiece, A Little Electronic Milky Way of Sound, as a sixteen-CD boxed set. Mind-bending. Edition of 750. Audio restoration by Jim O'Rourke. Sweet jeezus...Roland Kayn was a composer who rejected composition, a human who gave machines the benefit of the doubt. A German who began making music in the twentieth century with a pencil and paper, Kayn ended up spen…
Watching The Burning Bride
Long-awaited double cd reissue of the two Asmus Tietchens/Burrows collaborations which sound still remarkably fresh today. Watching The Burning Bride was originally released on Terry Burrows' label Hamster in 1986, while the second collaboration came out on Disaster Area in 1998. As usual the booklet reproduces the original lp sleeves and a lengthy text by Terry Burrows on how the collaboration between the two artists came about is also included. The release includes two short bonus tracks.
Anthology (1980-2017)
Anthology 1980-2017 is a compilation spanning a period of 37 years featuring Burnt Friedman's releases and edits thereof from vinyl-only labels (Latency, Marionette, Dekmantel, amongst others), plus four hitherto unreleased tracks. This compilation surveys Friedman's music from 1980 to 2017 and covers a broad spectrum of played and programmed rhythmic styles that traverse club music from techno, electro, and dub, but, above all, it traces Friedman's own artistic development; A trajectory t…
Vision Songs Live At Brilliant Corners
His utterly distinctive, captivating cross-fertilisation of New Age and Gospel Soul, unfurled in a live, hour-and-a-half improvised session, recorded in London last year. The 1984 work Vision Songs Vol. 1 — ‘devotional and inspirational songs’, Laraaji calls them — in its entirety, including the underground favourite All Of A Sudden. Lovingly presented, with a risograph inlay and photographic insert card, in a tiny edition, on cassette only.
Light Sleep
Startling side of pelting drum machines and psychedelic noise from Japanese synth/punk pioneer Hiromi Moritani a.k.a. Phew; an avant-garde vocalist who started out in art-punk unit Aunt Sally (whose only full-length was released by Vanity Records in 1979) and has since collaborated with everyone from Ryuinchi Sakamoto to Can, DAF and Bill Laswell during an illustrious career. Light Sleep packs the kind of febrile energy and thrust that you might expect from a young, new artist enthralled wi…
Le Ricordanze - The Complete Recordings 1973-2015
Less known to the Italian prog fans than many other far more acclaimed colleagues, the Piedmontese band Dedalus are among the most daring acts - and hence, progressive in the truest sense of the word - of the '70s, especially during the first half of the decade, the one that saw them releasing their first two LP's "Dedalus" and "Materiale per tre esecutori e nastro magnetico". While the first album was mainly based on jazz-rock coordinates, similar in style to Perigeo, the following work marked …
The RCA Mark II
C Spencer Yeh presents an album of electro-acoustic music made on the legendary but defunct RCA Mark II modular synth - nicknamed ‘Victor’ - at Columbia Uni. An ingenious concept, captivatingly executed. “The RCA Mark II is a follow-up to Yeh’s recent vocal work and is focused solely on the non-musical operation of the famed RCA Mark II synthesizer. Built and installed in 1959 at Columbia University, it was the first programmable synthesizer and became the bedrock upon which the Columbia-Princet…
Even when they speak of space
New Giuseppe Ielasi full lenght album. Music for whistling, microphone and digital degradation. Recorded in november 2016 and august 2017. to be played at low volume.
Escaped Language
Recorded during Ina/GRM’s 2016 Présences Électronique Festival in Paris, John Wiese’s “Escaped Language” is a concise and calculated piece which slowly evolved in various settings over a number of years. While 2015’s “Deviate From Balance” 2xLP was expansive and chronicled performances and work employing many other musicians, here Wiese dissects and reassembles portions of his vocabulary alone. Simultaneously dense and sparse, delicate and abrasive, free and tactical, the resulting reco…
Modern Methods For Ancient Rituals
The title of the debut album from The Transcendence Orchestra outlines the modus operandi of this pairing of Anthony Child and Daniel Bean. Recorded in a remote English rural setting over a period of 24 hours, this is an apt location for a recording that eschews time and space in favor of methodological displacement and deep psychological navigation. Modern Methods For Ancient Rituals is an experiment in acoustic and synthetic symbiosis which is deeply influenced by the atmosphere and acoust…
Hesaitix
Further departing from both the cinematic abstraction of Piteous Gate (PAN 066CD/LP, 2015) and the hectic drums of Damaged Merc (2016), Berlin producer M.E.S.H.'s new full-length, Hesaitix, is marked by its hyper-ornamented rhythms and a sense of pensive, moonlit spaces. The atmosphere has shifted; the radical deconstruction of previous releases has given way to subtler interventions, building new structures in strange territories. Shifting from the meditative to states of manic unease, Hes…
Earprints
After a slew of acclaimed releases by Equiknoxx, Robert Aiki Aubrey Lowe, Shinichi Atobe and Mica Levi in 2017, Demdike Stare’s DDS start 2018 in typically unexpected style with a remastered reissue of the little known second album from Move D’s Conjoint ensemble. Late night listeners ’n lovers of Miles Davis, Tortoise or Jan Jelinek’s neon Jazz minimalism will love this - in our eyes a total classic.Conjoint was the little-known but hugely regarded ensemble founded by David Moufang two decades …
Satan Im Sattel
Skulking hardware cranks from Hamburg’s Fallbeil duo, cooking up 90 minutes of K-holing, atonal digital noise recursion on tape along with two slices of grot on vinyl, especially for Nina’s V I S label down by the docks in Hamburg. After first appearing on Helena Hauff’s Return To Disorder label with Ultima Ratio in 2016, and turns for Boidae, Hafenschlamm and Mannequin in the meantime, the Fallbeil duo have made no concession to higher fidelities and remain resolutely grubby and visceral on all…
Post Self
Post Self is simultaneously inventive and classic Godflesh. The blue and icy atmosphere of Post Self can reach levels touched on in the happenings of early '90s Norway innovations. From the opening track, it's clear that the vocal performance is Justin Broadrick's best in ages, utilizing new approaches ranging from higher tortured screams to truly brutal and barbaric low roars not heard since Streetcleaner (1989). Within those extremes, mystically effected vocals coming from an industrial …
Exit Stance
Justin K Broadrick puts his club foot forward for Downwards on four trampling techno bombs gathered under the Exit Stance EP. With no prizes for guessing what the title is about, he further girds us against broken Britain’s grim future following his Suicide Estate 2LP for Hospital Productions. This is some of Broadrick’s most direct, primitive, and ruggedly impactful gear, forged in the belly of the black country with charred traces of late ‘90s Brummie techno edged by sparingly used daubs of pa…
Mercury's Rainbow
Zomby’s near-mythical Eski grime concept album was created over an intense two week period around 2008-2009 and features 16 uniquely formulated interpretations of Wiley’s seminal Eskibeat productions. It's been in hybernation ever since and, almost a decade later (and after many aborted attempts), is finally available for public consumption - still sounding like an ancient future. After nearly a decade in the making, Zomby finally dispatches his astonishing take on Wiley’s series of Eskibeat rel…
Papua Land Where Spirits Still Rule
Rainforest Spiritual Enslavement’s amazing first release is the final instalment in this reissue series remastered by Paul Corley and cut to vinyl for the first time after its initial release back in 2012 as a 4 x Cassette release made in a run of just 16 copies. It features 40 minutes of dank psychedelic ambience, reanimated and spatialized with hi-end studio black magick.Completing the reissue cycle of Rainforest Spiritual Enslavement’s ambient invocations, Papua New Guinea [2012] is rendered …
Taking Place In The Foyer
Taking Place In The Foyer was originally released in a run of just 14 copies on double tape back in 2012 and is now available on vinyl for the first time as part of the ongoing Rainforest Spiritual Enslavement reissue series.The newly remastered, first and last ever vinyl cut of Taking Place In The Foyer forms the penultimate instalment in Rainforest Spiritual Enslavement’s necessary reissue scheme. Originally appearing second in the series, it then served to only heighten the enigma of a projec…
Worlds Within Worlds
Unwinding history - catching a glimpse of its truths, can be a near impossible task. There’s an understandable tendency to look in the obvious places, seeking generality and concise definition to guide the way. While this presents obvious paradoxes within the fields of avant-garde sound practice and experimental music - territories which, by their very nature, are resistant to genre, categorization, and definition, the impulse persists, allowing strange and singular free-standing efforts to slip…