Seven stars
Fennesz's first solo release since Black Sea (2008) is a 4 track 10 vinyl, with a CD version soon available. Using acoustic and electric guitars, bass, synths, computers, Fennesz continues to engage and entrance us in equal measure. 'Liminal', 'July', 'Shift', 'Seven Stars' (with Steven Hess on drums). Fennesz writes: Seven Stars was recorded in Vienna in January 2011. I recorded and mixed the album within 3 weeks. Liminal and July were existing pieces which I have reworked. (I wrote an early ve…
Stress Test
Jaws is a performance oriented sound from Los Angeles, California. It employs slithering electronics, confessional narrative, and impromptu stratagems in an effort to brim the optics, confuse the mind and engage the body. Beginning as an exercise in speed and personality, Jaws has crossed the landscape multiple times, acquiring and discarding forms, tactics and participants with equal aplomb. Stress Test is the overheated, heaving combination of high-ratchet club dynamics, materially co…
Sufferers
Ohio-based noise upsetter Mike Shiflet has amassed an enviable amount of releases in the last decade. Tapes, vinyl, cdrs – you name it, he’s done it, but it’s taken until now for Shiflet to weld together what he regards as his defining work. The first in a series of two ‘proper’ albums, ‘Sufferers’ takes the listener to the very heart of Shiflet’s sound – through the abrasive noise heard on his early releases all the way to the shimmering ambience that made up his breakthrough album ‘Lla…
Intersex
Intersex is the debut LP by Steven Warwick a.k.a Heatsick. The title references the work of German sexologist Magnus Hirschfeld looking at how music and sexuality can operate in flux on a constantly sliding scale. Executed on just a Casio keyboard and manipulated loops via guitar pedals, Intersex deliberately evokes "ersatz" notions of electronic dance music and early electronics in the line of Roberto Cacciapaglia's Ann Steel record , the work of Warner Jepson and the kaleidoscopic sou…
Moss
Moss, is a live recording from a unique collaboration by sound artists/musicians Molly Berg, Olivia Block, Steve Roden and Stephen Vitiello. This was a midnight concert at the beautiful Trinity Cathedral in San Jose, CA which was part of the 01SJ Biennial. Olivia and Steve had performed solo sets on the previous nights. The final night was meant to be a duo with Molly and Stephen but the opportunity to play with musicians/friends who we admire so much called out for an invitation to play …
12k Promo Sampler 002
The second 12k sampler CD features 12 songs chronologically looking forward to early 2012 and back to the recent releases and clocks in at over 60 minutes. It offers a sneak-peak at upcoming music plus a re-cap of the past year. The CD is being sold for only $4/$6 (USA/INT'L respectively) and that includes shipping. It's an inexpensive way to familiarize yourself with the latest on 12k. 12k welcomes two new artists to the roster: The Boats (UK) bring their electro-acoustics into song-stru…
Shizuku
12k presents Shizuku, the debut album from Illuha (a play off the word “island” in Portugese) comprised of Tokyo residents Corey Fuller and Tomoyoshi Date. Shizuku was recorded in a 100-year old church in Bellingham, Washington and the duo used ambient and quad-microphone techniques to capture the natural acoustics of the high-vaulted ceilings, wooden floors, stained glass and the natural resonances of the space.A beautiful variety of instruments were used to create the soft tones of the album a…
Atlas Nation
French drone deities High Wolf might be best known for their shimmering Not Not Fun efforts, but this latest full-length (emerging on the ever-reliable Holy Mountain imprint) is probably their best yet. Apparently it was inspired by a long trip to India and Nepal, and this Eastern promise is clearly reflected in the band's sound palette. Pulsing tablas sit beneath a dense, sludgy bed of droning guitars - but 'Atlas Nation' isn't a chore to listen to. While a great deal of drone music can …
The Din of Light
Named after the largest and most hallowed Egyptian sites of ancient reverence to our pre-historic gods from outer space, Karnak Temples is not out to build pyramids, but perhaps to update the process of dragging massive blocks up precarious slopes in hopes of building a mountain to heaven, except now the process is a bit more terrestrial (escape velocity's a bitch). The lesson is simple: no matter how many diaphanous puffs of guitar delay we may send to the upper atmosphere, they'll never make i…
In Dust
In recent years, there has been a surge of electronic artists, for the most part new comers, who have rejected the digital approach which had dominated since the nineties in favour of the more organic analogue textures pioneered during the late sixties and well into the seventies by German experimental musicians, from the most exploratory, with the likes of Emeralds or Oneohtrix Point Never, to the bulk of the Scandinavian disco scene, spearheaded by Lindstrøm, Prins Thomas and DiskJokke.…
Canal Gendyn
Editions Mego is happy to announce the release of Kanal GENDYN, a vinyl and DVD set by Russell Haswell & Florian Hecker. This is the first full-length release by the artists following their highly-acclaimed albums, Blackest Ever Black and UPIC Warp Tracks. In the late '90s/early 2000s, it became common for bands, or solo artists to perform live -- often alternative -- soundtracks to feature films or silent classics. Critical of obvious instrumentation and the combination with known classic f…
Elemental Disgrace
Cut at Dubplates & Mastering, Berlin August 2011. 'Elemental Disgrace' is an album that needs to happen now. Finally, the next phase has arrived - a stunning double side-long record of some of the U.S. best underground synthesizer music we have heard here at the Spectrum Spools headquarters. Whatever rise to the synthesizer came later on in the 00's is hardly of any concern to Greh Holger and his Hive Mind project. Having released private press cassettes of solo synth works as far back as 2002, …
Decimus 8
**Limited to 300 copies in hand painted jackets* No Neck Blues Band guy Pat Murano heads deeper into the cosmos with the latest in his head-swallowing 'Decimus' series. There's an ostensible clarity to this installment distinguishing it from previous editions, with almost baroque synth work percolating through the first side before it cascades into billowing, blown-out distortion and physically wrenched drones, like being expanded and contracted by massive gravitational forces and element…
Music For How Mata Hari Lost Her Head And Found Her Body
Julian Lynch and filmmaker Amy Ruhl first collaborated on Lynch's Seed video from his proper debut album (Orange You Glad) on Olde English Spelling Bee. Around this time, Ruhl was beginning work on her first film, an animated, allegorical biography of the courtesan, dancer & spy, Mata Hari. Spurred from talks about a using gamelan to score the film, Ruhl asked Lynch to contribute songs to the film & he delivered five new instrumentals. Drawing on both Indonesian music and his own bedro…
Wizards
With so much being made of current practitioners of the Kosmiche/New Age vibe here's your opportunity to hear an original. Original copies hardly ever surface and even the 2007 repress (which sounded quite thin) commands quite a fee on internet auction sites. This straight analog pressing sounds as close to the original master tapes as you can get. 500 made. Pressed at RTI."If you have been wondering what all the fuss about "private press new age" is, go here to find out. Your mind shall be subt…
Desert Fires
The solo project of Brooklyn-based guitarist and filmmaker Sarah Lipstate (Rhys Chatham's Guitar Army, Glenn Branca's 100 guitar ensemble, Parts & Labor, Carla Bozulich / Evangelista, Cold Cave), follows up her Red Rainbows CD (No Fun 2009) with this compositional evolutionary step from layered, loop-based drones to more expansive formal arrangements of swells, throbs, tones and shimmer. 'Almost Alright' explores territory charted by Fripp & Eno or synth-heavy contemporaries Emeralds. 'Ki…
Red Mars
Loren Connors has long been heralded as one of the country's most inimitable guitar voices. Like kindred spirit John Fahey, Connors' legacy began by quietly self-releasing a series of raw and embryonic LPs. Since the late 1970s, Connors' use of haunted Delta Blues, minimalism and compositional underpinnings have become an avant-garde style synonymous to him. Along the way, musicians diverse as Chan Marshall, Keiji Haino, Darin Gray, Jim O'Rourke, Jandek, and Alan Licht have sought Connors…
A Million Corpses of Dead Bees/High Road
Tipped Bowler returns to the fertile soil of New Zealand to cull two choice improvisations. On the A-side, Wellington's Nova Scotia delivers 'A Million Corpses of Dead Bees', an eighteen minute free-rock burner. Growing from violin sine-squeak and distant shortwave, the piece gains momentum with its patient drumming and resolves into a saxophone swarm shot through with synthetic scrabble. On the reverse, Dunedin's Eye comes off colder and more aggressive. 'High Road' throttles the listener…
Synthesist / Re-Synthesist
Synthesist is the debut album by Harald Grosskopf, the enigmatic percussionist behind Ash Ra Tempel, Klaus Schulze, and Cosmic Jokers. Originally released by Sky Records in 1980, RVNG Intl. celebrates the 30th year anniversary with this newly mastered and packaged reissue. Berlin, Germany, summer of 1979, Harald Grosskopf, then 30 years old, was at a personal and creative crossroads. His girlfriend just left him, and Ashra (Manuel Göttsching's "solo" project) was on temporary hiatus. Harald …
Channel Pressure
The production duo's debut full-length album is a highly focused study in the effects of consumer electronics that touches on sensual bangers and hyper-spherical anthems prime for the dance floor. The record was engineered by another childhood pal, Al Carlson, and mixed by Prefuse 73 who states: 'Mixing these ideas that span from high school notebooks into a present sonic territory is F+L's right on conceptual evolution.' There's a fantastical, futuristic narrative arc running hard throug…