V
Given how prolific Barn Owl have been in the past, it's surprisingly to learn that it's been over 18 months since "Lost in the Glare," their last proper full-length. In the interim Jon Porras and Evan Caminiti have issued a variety of solo albums, but the duo has also used that time to augment the sound palette of Barn Owl with electronics and synthesizers. Thankfully, the same blackened soot and scorched psychedelia are still prevalent, they just reach deeper timbres and more expansive textures…
Drones
In the beginning there was the piano. As soon as he had mastered the basics, Jean-Philippe Goude discovered the spell of melancholy while working on a little musical piece: an etude ringing out in the style of a somber hymn. Not the dead meat smells of somberness that, according to Picabia, serious people emit, but the earthen gravity of an abyss dug by life itself. Everything is the result of this bedazzlement. At 11 years old, Jean-Philippe Goude closed his eyes. When his eyelids finall…
Vergezichten
Rutger Zuydervelt aka Machinefabriek is a master of self-made sound and time-stretching, sensitively handling organic recordings and samples on countless releases, and regards preset sounds in an organ or a cheap keyboard as a tonal find, as a part of the cacophony of everyday life. These bontempi-rhythms plus the computer-stretched sounds of saxophone (Espen Reinertsen) and voice (Mariska Baars) are the base elements of "Vergezicht 1" and "Vergezicht 2." It is stunning how Zuydervelt man…
Anxiety
Anxiety is the full-length follow up to Autre Ne Veut's 2010 self-titled debut, which was for many the definitive post-millennial Failure Pop statement outside of time and style. Autre Ne Veut rivaled other lovelorn 'missteps' such as Marvin Gaye's Here My Dear and Big Star's Sister Lovers. If you didn't hear the connection, you weren't listening closely enough. Be that as it may, ANV brazenly decided to make it easier for people with his post-canonical return. No longer playing the role o…
Ectoplasma
Software Recording Co. presents Tropa Macaca's fourth release, Ectoplasm. The ambient-noise duo of André Abel and Joana da Conceição have been going strong from their Portugal home base since 2005, while lunging out into the world with releases via Qbico and Ruby Red. The following to 2009's Sensação do Princípio on Stiltbreeze, Ectoplasm finds Tropa Macaca creating a quantic fantasy sound not unlike a cybernetically enhanced Taj Mahal Travellers interpreting a lost chapter of One Hundred…
Burnt Up On Re-Entry
Burnt Up On Re-Entry is an infinite space where dark psychedelics are crafted using a combination of raw electronics, manipulated samples & heavy rock guitar. The song craft remains centered around a heavy melodic & melancholic core, which has been prevalent across the entire Boduf Songs canon.
Live At Skymall
Jan Jelinek, Hanno Leichtmann and Andrew Pekler have formed a trio that can truly be called a supergroup. As solo artists, all three members are among the most renowned of Berlin's electronic musicians. When playing together as Groupshow, the three instrumentalists -- themselves largely informed by minimalist sensibilities -- engage with the idiom of free-form collective improvisation, which has a long tradition in Germany dating back to the days of Fluxus and Krautrock. Consequentially, t…
Diversions 1994-1996
2015 repress, originally released in 2012. The 30-minute Diversions 1994-1996 EP is made up entirely from samples from the collection of Lee Gamble's jungle cassette mix-tapes. The audio has been subjected to analog and digital deformations, while trying to extract, expand upon, and convey particular qualities emblematic of the original music. The effect is that of a musical body scan, all that is solid melts into air. Sounds are unearthed, dissected on the operating table, melted and unloc…
Unseen Worlds
1994 release, Late-eighties works re-released by Spiegel's own label, after the demise of the original imprint Scarlet Records"I had started as an improviser, largely self-taught and playing by ear on "folk" plucked instruments. Once I began a formal study of music, only after college studies apart from music, I had to learn to adjust to writing silent notes on paper with a dim hope of possibly eventually hearing them played by others, though my lack of keyboard skills with which to compose and …
Obsolete systems
finally restocked: 2001 release. An overview of Laurie Spiegel's electronics works, ranging from 1970 to 1983. Utilizing analog synthesizers (Buchla 100, Electrcomp 100), tape, digital synthesis, Echoplex, Bell Labs' GROOVE Hybrid system, etc. Comparable to classic 70s-era Schnitzler streaming, this is a very memorable document of this obscure composer's best works. "Laurie Spiegel, electronic music pioneer, has been working with cutting-edge electronic instruments since the 1970s. She has…
The Temple Recording
I am currently making recordings like this: I go to a certain place and choose an object Ð mainly it is a landscape, which is interesting to me. I fix a stethoscope with a small built-in air mike onto my temples. The position of the air microphone can be set anywhere near the ears, but I feel that our temples are the best and only place for that. The stethoscope captures vibrations of my muscles and blood flows. Because of the nature of the air microphone, environmental noises are recorded, t…
O kokos tis anixis (Grains of spring)
The ancient Greek philosophers thought that the world is constituted of a series of grains of space and time. When I walked around Miura Peninsula in the springtime, I felt the same way - the quality of the space and the time seemed to be formed by a series of grains of sounds. Each place has its own unique character. You could label it as a particular quality of the place. The quality of the sound.'-'This is one of my trials to present a 'subject' as a piece of work - which can be called…
Cry
Cry was recorded in a shed at Taieri Mouth between 1998 and 2000 and then released by Emperor Jones on CD in 2000. Alastair has always been one of the most admired yet paradoxically ignored musicians from the New Zealand underground since he first started out in The Rip on Flying Nun Records in the early 1980s. Having already worked with the incredibly talented New Zealander otherwise known as Michael Morley, it seemed natural for MIE’s next step to go on to work with Alastair on getting …
The Mineral Victim
After a lengthy silence, Chora’s Ben Nash came back recently with an album made entirely on his computer, and now here’s another one which seems to have been made with a combination of computer and guitar, carving out slow melodic soundscapes with glassy, patient drones, disembodied voices and a whole variety of tones which swell and recede for quite an ominous, organic-sounding psychedelic thrum.There are two lengthy pieces on here, on the first side there’s ‘From 80 Fathoms’, which is quite sp…
Lonely women's club
Beautiful new work from Lawrence English. Pressed in an edition of 500 copies. Somewhere after dark, before dawn, in a place where natural light is shunned and organ is singing. It's voice is that of an arcing clouds of tone, emerging and falling with an uneasy sense of pace and direction. The voice warbles, a vibrato of shifting pulse and subtle variation. The room around it is filled with a dusty ash; smoke in haze like proportions. Eyes are blood shot, sunken below the rim of a glass. …
White Shadows in the South Seas
It's difficult to know how to summurise the meandering journey that has been the life and times of Mike Cooper. Having just celebrated his 70th year of mischief making here's what we can tell you... A young Mike Cooper can be spotted playing a beatnik guitarist on an anti-nuclear march in London beat cult film 'That Kind Of Girl'. His first band The Blues Committee played with and supported blues legends such John Lee Hooker, Howlin Wolf and Jimmy Reed. Cooper was central in launching several o…
Crushed Interior
Jim Donadio's debut Psychedelic Black album as Prostitutes came out in 2012 and ended up on many year-end lists, fitting in somewhere between the post-noise abrasive techno of Pete Swanson, Container, Nate Young, etc., the roughened post-punk hues of Powell and the more precision-built constructions of the Raster-Noton label. Donadio's follow-up, Crushed Interior, arrives via Digitalis and picks up where he last left us, taking us through to the next, blackened layer of re-formulated techno te…
BM-01
LP version, featuring an exclusive vinyl-only track. Full-color printed innersleeve; limited to 500 copies. The BioMechanica project marks the first collaboration between Francisco López and Arturo Lanz (founder and member of the current Esplendor Geométrico tandem) after thirty years of an ongoing relationship. Their debut album, BM-01, is the outcome of years of intense work in multiple cities across the world, from Beijing to Reykjavik all the way to Johannesburg. Raw power and original rh…
Lux Aeterna
Legit CD reissue, Lux Aeterna, was originally composed to celebrate a friend of William Sheller's wedding, thematically driven by concepts of union and togetherness, and ostensibly based on the Catholic mass, this is far from any sort of religious music you've ever heard. Following in the footsteps of other iconoclastic composers, like Serge Gainsbourg, Jean-Claude Vannier, Lee Hazlewood, David Axelrod, Scott Walker and of course Magma (more on that in a second), Sheller conjured up what i…
Pan
LP version. This is the first solo effort from Jonas Munk released under his own name. Jonas Munk is a musician and producer from Odense, Denmark who has been active in a wide range of musical styles for the past decade. In the European psych-rock community he is mostly known as the guitar player in the respected stoner/jazz/Krautrock-outfit Causa Sui as well as related projects such as Chicago Odense Ensemble, a joint session project featuring members of Causa Sui, Chicago Underground Colle…