Dress
* Edition of 500 + 16-page booklet *By the mid-1990s, there was a quietly thriving underground in Wellington, New Zealand, made up of a number of loosely aligned operatives - Surface of The Earth and their World Resources imprint; Fever Hospital and 8 Dec, and the music made by the members of The Garbage & the Flowers after that group temporarily dissolved in 1992..." One of those rather short-lived groups was Dress, who on record consisted of Yuri Frusin and Helen Johnstone from The Garbage & t…
Split (LP)
**Edition of 200 copies, in process of stocking** Mutual admirers of each other’s work, these titans of Scottish and French dronefolk team up for a split LP, with two tracks by Pefkin and three by Roxane Métayer. The fact that these like-minded artists explore the boundaries of what connects them, makes it a very exciting release. The Pefkin side is Gayle at her most melodic, whereas Roxane goes down a poetic and rhythmical path. Dream combo. The album is pressed on high-quality german vinyl, in…
All Thoughts Fly
**2022 Repress. Black Vinyl** Sacro Bosco (“Sacred Grove”) is the starting point for Anna von Hausswolff’s new album All Thoughts Fly, recorded at Gothenburg’s Örgryte New Church and heavily infused with the space’s atmospheric nuance, which renders the theatric richness of Anna’s compositions at their most billowing and melodramatic. Here in solo instrumental mode, the entire record consists of just one instrument, the pipe organ, and represents absolute liberation of the imagination. All Thoug…
Blemish
Recorded in February and March 2003, 'Blemish' has been hailed as a masterpiece by critics across the world. Working primarily alone, David Sylvian created an impromptu suite of songs for guitar, electronics and voice. The compositions were crafted from improvisational sessions by Sylvian and also by acclaimed guitarist Derek Bailey (on 3 tracks) which were captured live in the studio, resulting in an emotionally raw, minimal work, of immediacy and stark beauty.
‘Blemish’ was David Sylvian’s fir…
Le Macerie Di Babilonia
* Limited edition of 300 copies * sferic mark 5 years of influential operations with a special deep dive into ancient/modern Mediteranean culture by Giovanni Napolano, who’s usually known for crankier industro-dancehall output as NPLGNN (Reel Torque, Youth) and programming the wonderful MBE label - a proper RIYL Jay Glass Dubs, Christos Chondropoulos, Alan Lomax, DJ Screw, Coda Lunga.Taking his native Naples, Italy as a locus of Med culture, Napolano plunges the port city’s palimpsest of energie…
Swarm Structure
*In process of stocking.* Swarm Structure is the fifth LP since Thought Broadcast began over a decade ago in New York City. This release is the first LP in several years after a steady stream of instantly gone tapes such as Extinction Circle, released just at the start of the pandemic. Swarm Structure is the next step for project's vision of urban nocturne and apocalyptic concrète; it is a raw demonstration in covert and lysergic minimal electronics and industrial rhythm, all rendered in TB's si…
Undone Shal
Brooding psychedelic revelations from the Stavangerian outsidercore. The uncanny is never out of bounds in the debut release by shadowy Norwegian duo Firmaet Forvoksen. Gaute Granli and Thore Warland, two archetypes of the Stavanger experimental scene long active through solo work (Gaute Granli’s recent Ultra Eczema notoriety, for one) and other collaborative projects (Thore Warland’s ongoing drum devolutions with Golden Oriole, for another), have joined forces under multiple configurations over…
Dust
*2022 stock.* Dust is a piece composed by the Swiss artist Antoine Chessex. A slow meta-physical progression, the junction of tense violins and a revoxian dust, juxtaposing, overlapping, resorbing and accompanying each other, before exploding in a powerful final catharsis. Like a proposal for departure towards infinity, a before-after Big Bang, highly successful, disturbing at times as is the vast unknown… the music of a ship leaving for the limits of the cosmos perhaps, in any case it can reson…
Darling
*2022 stock.* Adrien Kessler, former bass player and singer of the band "Goz of Kermeur" who toured their three albums between 1992 and 2000, comes back full of fantastic strenght with this new super-power band and their first CD release. Darling is what you need ! A rabid pop mood, hypnotic, violent and grinding, somewhere between the young Bowie's glam rock, the obscure violence of Birthday Party, the craziness of Pere Ubu or Beefheart and this unique little touch, free and indescribable that …
Landscape Man
*Limited edition of 200 copies.* Robert Desnos dreamed: I saw Davey Williams and Johnny Shines playing dice with Fred Lane; Isaiah Owens and Andrei Tarkovsky witnessing to a UAB anthropology graduate student; at one point Diogenes the Cynic leaned his head in the door, then moved on. Fred Shuttlesworth, trumpet in hand, kept shouting, “Where’s the one? Where’s the one” Thomas Blanton, Robert Chambliss, and Bobby Cherry, dressed in immaculate white Sufi gowns, whirling and whirling and whirling. …
Excavation
*In process of stocking. Limited edition of 300 copies.* This release from Astral Editions, the rock offshoot of Astral Spirits, promises a lot of gems and this collaboration from Chris Cochrane (No Safety, Weird Little Boy) and John Thayer (Drunken Sufis, YAI) sits high atop the pile. Cochrane’s guitars crumple and crush, they squelch against Thayer’s rhythms with a gleeful sickness. “Zinc” chews through layers of tin and turbulence until Stan Zenkov’s sax enters the scene, throwing notes like …
Outside
*Limited edition of 200 copies.* Sturdily rooted in Michigan but at home anywhere she steps, Shelley Salant is a wearer of many hats. Anyone who's worked in even the outer reaches of underground music and D.I.Y. culture in the last ten years has probably run into Shelley, maybe when she booked their band a show, or had them by the radio show she's done tirelessly for almost a decade or possibly when she passed through town playing with Tyvek, Chain & The Gang, The Vitas, Swimsuit or one of the m…
Froggy’s
*In process of stocking. Limited edition of 500 copies* Pleased to announce that after two years as a digital only release Little Wings' Froggy's is now available on vinyl!! We've been fans of Little Wings for 20 years now so to be able to release a new record from the brilliantly prolific Kyle Field is a dream come true! Not to mention Froggy's is one of the weirder and most amazing Little Wings albums we've heard and we're thrilled to have it here on Astral Editions. Based on a now defunct res…
The Locked Room
Tip! *In process of stocking. Limited edition of 300 copies.* The Locked Room imagines a protagonist who experiences the outside world as an endless escape room, a place where, in the early hours, every passing tail-light, train in the distance, hunched bike rider or crying bird might be a possible riddle, leading to a passage or the discovery of a key.
Once opened, however, a room locked from the other side could just be the same room as the one you're in - only slightly different. And maybe t…
Magic Moments
FSK (Freiwillige Selbstkontrolle, German meaning "voluntary self control") is a German band that was formed in Munich in 1980. It became involved in the underground-part of the German New-Wave-Scene of the early 1980s.
Magic Moments was originally released in 1982 on ZickZack Platten, this EP includes the four tracks "Wir steigen ein", "Trink wie ein Tier", "Herzschuß Melodie" & "Viel zu viel". The reissue is accompanied by a booklet with liner notes by Tim Klütz (in German).
Paradise Of Delusion
*Limited edition of 500 copies.* Paradise Of Delusion, the first vinyl release of the music of Japan’s legendary psych-pop group Shizuka, originally appeared in June 2021. Long-awaited, the LP sold out almost immediately, and already changes hands for three-figure amounts. An’archives is pleased to announce a CD edition of Paradise Of Delusion, making this music accessible again to a wider audience. Drawn from a 2001 performance at Binspark, Nishi Ogikubo, Paradise Of Delusion is gorgeous and ot…
Lunatic Pearl
*Limited edition of 550 copies.* Following the long-awaited Paradise Of Delusion LP from 2021, An’archives announces Lunatic Pearl, a 10” EP by Japanese psych-pop legends Shizuka. As with the material on Paradise, 狂気の真珠 [Lunatic Pearl] draws from the deep well of music the quartet recorded in 2001, this time from two studio sessions. Here, though, the group’s classic line-up of Shizuka, Maki Miura, Jun Kosugi and Seven is augmented –on the a-side, they’re joined by Yasushi Nagata on guitar; flip…
Hydration
Following the release of his album trilogy (Kwaidan, Komachi and Kofū), Meitei has established himself as a defining voice in contemporary Japanese music. By sharing intricate sonic stories and impressions of his nation's rich culture, he has built an aural world around his notion of the ‘lost Japanese mood’. His latest project, under the new moniker Tenka, aims to work without the boundaries of theme, storytelling or audience expectations. Spending many hours in the mountain forests that he li…
ultratronics
A decade after the release of ‘supercodex,’ Noton is thrilled to welcome back Japanese artist and composer Ryoji Ikeda with his latest long-player, ‘ultratronics,’ out on December 2nd 2022.
Featuring audio material recorded between 1989 and 1999 and compositions created between 2013 and 2022, ’ultratronics’ explores sound’s arithmetical and computational essence and renders them into the propulsive auditory experience that constitutes Ikeda’s sound signature.
Ryoji Ikeda has created numerous imm…
Nemo Point Soundmap for Terrestrial Melanoheliophobics
Representing Ahad's Flux Worlds 1, the lengthily titled 'Nemo Point Soundmap...' album is the very latest solo offering from this Hungarian sonic traveller now based in Berlin, Zsolt Sőrés. Spread over the two discs are seven pieces that take a combination of viola, bass, piano strings, voice, mellotron, dictaphone, percussion and all manner of other instrumentation and objects into a realm where inner space folds in on itself and unwittingly assumes the guise of multitudinous journeys to those …