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…
Emergency Room
"A few new developments for electronic production duo Games. The pair comprised of Oneohtrix Point Never's Daniel Lopatin and Tiger City's Joel Ford are no longer calling themselves Games -- instead, they now go by the very Italo disco-sounding Ford & Lopatin. First order of business for F&L: running a new offshoot of Brooklyn label Mexican Summer, appropriately titled Software." -- Cribbing from Pitchfork."To precede the release of Channel Pressure, Ford & Lopatin will be releasing an Emergency…
Dort Ist Der Weg
Latest from these blackened doomdrone soundscapers, once again demonstrating that these guys definitely don't let any sort of genre classification define what they do, cuz what they do here is let their krautrock freak flag fly, whipping up a gorgeous chunk of hazy, rhythmic psychedelia, a reinterpretation of a classic Popol Vuh jam (from 1976), which does indeed channel the same sort of brooding, blissy mesmer, a dreamy, dark dirge, hypnotic and hazy, spidery guitar melodies over simple …
Only Stories
Latest from the uber prolific Aidan Baker, of mighty doomdronedirge duo Nadja, and as we've discovered in the past, Nadja is Baker's outlet for the heavier stuff, while working under his own name he tends to veer toward the minimal, ambient and drone side of the spectrum. So that's what we were sort of expecting from this, and while it definitely does lean more toward those sounds that the crush of Nadja, it's actually something else entirely, a solo acoustic record. That's right, just ac…
Univrs
Gatefold 2LP version. Alva Noto's (Carsten Nicolai) Univrs follows on from and develops the concept of the album Unitxt (R-N 095CD/LP). Whereas the focus of Unitxt was on the processing of rhythmic patterns ("unit" = unit of measurement, element) and information ("txt" = data, language), with Univrs the focus is on the conceptual differentiation of a universal language ("universum/universal" = unity, entirety). The 14 tracks on Univrs have evolved from a live context, hence, the approach is…
Attack On Silence
Sacred geometries, and their sonic equivalents, are said to mirror the micro and macroscopic structures of the physical world; the complex harmonies of the Tibetan singing bowl, like the patterns of the Mandala, allow access to the deepest levels of the consciousness inducing meditative states that transform the very being of their participants. In the modern reciprocals of these technologies the shift is one of teleology. The sacred metals and antique art of the singing bowls give way to…
World Complete
Harmonizer, or as lovingly referred to as HARMO around these parts is the Vermont duo of Toby Aronson and Greg Davis, whose previous effort, their self-titled debut on Aronson's own stellar NNA Tapes label was the definitive 5th world statement, and solidified them as sensais in the koan of new drone worship shared by the likes of fellow melodic noisers Caboladies and OPN. In fact Greg Davis (Kranky, Carpark) is zone veteran shredder whose explorations into pastoral electronics have been w…
Dropped Pianos
This Tim Hecker release is composed of sketch pieces recorded in 2010 in preparation for what would become the Ravedeath, 1972 album. All of the compositions are piano driven and minimal in nature. This is not a new Tim Hecker album, but rather a peek behind the curtains into the working process. That these pieces stand on their own as compelling soundworks is a testament to the fact that Tim Hecker is at the absolute top of his game at the moment, and has been for years.