A Golden Brain
** Limited Edition of 300 ** Kraus played synthesizer, guitar, bass, tape loops, sampler and percussion. All songs written, performed, recorded, and mixed by Kraus at Pudding Island, Auckland in 2019 and 2020, except "Queen of the Land of Gorre" recorded at Rocklands, Auckland 2017. "Then he hewed the brain in an hundred pieces, and when he had done so he took up all those pieces, and threw them out at a window into the ditches of the castle."
Thanks to Damian Golfinopoulos, Kate Anderson, Kira…
Sings
** Limited Edition of 300 ** The Roman on the cover soldiers on in silence. This album is the product of excavations in materials recorded at home, EMS in Stockholm, Worm in Rotterdoom, and Willem Twee Studios in ’s-Hertogenbosch, much of which has been collaged, recollaged, broken apart, bleeped backwards and put back together with the kind of casual elegance that takes years of practice to perfect. Hiele is a very busy man: aside from his music (solo, commissions, and in collaboration with far…
Schlagende Wetter
In 1982, when the entire industrial elite of today was still in primary school and could barely read and write, four experimental musicians under the name Kowalski released an album called "Schlagende Wetter", which the NDW-fixated German public completely ignored, as expected. With their bizarre steel machine rock, vaguely situated between Kraftwerk, Tangerine Dream and Bap, Kowalski were a whole decade ahead of their time and ignited a crashing, pulsating sound inferno by means of artfully pol…
Bewegliche Ziele
* Limited edition including a colored 7 inch vinyl (transparent yellow) and 3 inch Mini CD * It's 1981. Everything seems possible in the realms of music. The barriers between genres are being willfully torn down, punk is discovering the synthesizer, the drum machine is replacing the drummer and no idea is too absurd to pursue. The winds of change are blowing from New York to London, Berlin and Tokyo and there's a palpable, uninhibited spirit of optimism in the air turning music industry on it's …
Sound American no. 25 - The Folk Issue
Sound American's 25th issue celebrates explores the intersections of folk and experimental music practices. Guest edited/curated by Sarah Hennies and Anna Roberts-Gevalt, two of American's most forward-looking practitioners in the experimental and folk fields respectively, SA25 takes on questions of a musical community, and what it means to work in and out of its traditions. The issue features writing by Ana Alonso-Minutti on La Llorona, Drew Daniel on Throbbing Gristle, Henry Flynt on his own v…
Mike Wexler with Synthetic Love Dream
n 2014, while wrapping up the mix sessions for Syntropy (three:four, 2016), Mike Wexler found himself writing a different kind of song. Whereas Syntropy had been beholden to a world of ideas laying just beyond the purview of the songs themselves, something new began to present itself - something more streamlined, more personal, direct, and grounded in a bedrock universality of form. Where was this shift coming from? - At the same time decidedly more straightforward and troublingly dark. With Nov…
Jupiter and Beyond
Jupiter, the gas giant in our Solar System, with thunderstorms a thousand times more powerful than on Earth, rainfalls of diamonds in the atmosphere, temperatures below -100°C, plenty of hydrogen, 79 moons and a South pole that looks like an abstract painting, has just the kind of environment this music seems to emanate from.
Jupiter and Beyond, the second collaborative effort of composer/performer Rafael Toral and percussionist João Pais Filipe as a duo (after Saturn in 2016), is definitely not…
Wa
* 2021 Stock * Musician, composer and one of the most revered figures for today’s younger generation of experimental and alternative Arabic music-scenes, Kamilya Jubran (text, oud & vocals, collaborates with long standing musical partner, composer, accomplished trumpet player and seasoned electronic musician Werner Hasler (trumpet & electronics).
In Wa (Arabic for and), their third album together as a duo, Kamilya Jubran and Werner Hasler continue to interrogate their listening and their express…
Exterior Lux
Jac Berrocal is a 1946-born musician (trumpet player), poet and sometime film actor who came of age in the ‘70s Paris improv scene, where the boundaries between music, art and theatre were porous and begging to be breached. Inspired by bebop, chanson, free jazz, beat poetry, early rock ‘n roll and myriad Eastern influences, and with an iconoclastic, anything-goes approach to instrumentation and technique that would later align him with post-punk sensibilities, Berrocal blazed an eccentric and un…
Songs From the Rain Palace
Blaine L. Reininger needs no special introduction. He is an American post-punk, new-wave and alternative pop singer, songwriter, musician, multi-instrumentalist (particularly violin), writer and performer. He is known for being a member of the group Tuxedomoon since 1977 after co-founding it with Steven Brown and, latterly, for a notable music and theatre career, both as a soloist and contributor to other artists' recordings, including The Durutti Column, Snakefinger, Anna Domino, Savage Republi…
A Safe Substitute
Storm Bugs are an English post punk band formed in 1978 in Deptford, London, by Philip Sanderson and Steven Ball who had met in the Medway Towns, England. The band have been linked to a number of genres including: cassette culture, industrial music and DIY. Storm Bugs were initially active between 1978 and 1982 and reformed in 2001. Sanderson had experimented with tape recorders whilst still at school, after moving to London in 1978 he began to get out of hours access to the electronic music stu…
It Doesn't Matter Where It's Solstice When You're in the Room
Martyn Bates is an English singer, musician and songwriter. After releasing tapes of experimental, industrial music as Migraine Inducers he formed Eyeless In Gaza with Peter Becker in January 1980. The duo became known for their unconventional instrumentation and arrangements, and for Bates’s passionate vocals. From 1992 onwards, Bates has run a parallel career recording and performing with a re-vitalised Eyeless In Gaza – with Eyeless deftly blending song with collaged soundscaping - while Bate…
Oddities 2013-2015
Hardy Fox was the primary composer of The Residents. He created an incredible body of work, using all kinds of names other than The Residents, amongst them Combo De Mechanico, Sonidas De La Noche, Dead Eye Dick, Charles Bobuck or Black Tar And The Cry Babies. The Tar projects were generally created to help raise money for needy projects for poverty, mass destruction in fire, and to fight the evil of Trump uprising. Before Hardy died, he sent us several albums to be released after his passing. On…
Beautiful Eyes
The Residents are an American art collective best known for their over 60 studio albums that were recorded over a period of over forty years. They also created some outstanding multimedia works, mainly three CD projects and ten DVDs. Working as an anonymous collective, their identities were kept secret until in 2017 Hardy Fox revealed himself as their primary composer. Hardy died in October 2018, but the group continue to record and perform. Recently, several new albums have been released, among…
Drookitarlùp
Giancarlo Toniutti and James Wyness met several times in various European places to compose drookitarlùp, a 23' piece for 42 players with mostly folk, extraeuropean, or self-built and unusual wind, string, friction and percussion acoustic instruments. An orchestra of specialised players, The Kafkian Cladistique Claque, gathered with the authors at Andrej Bagar Theatre in Nitra, Slovakia.
They rehearsed time and again, then both composers conducted one performance each with their specific interpr…
Glory Days
**Edition of 500. Orange vinyl** Heather Leigh is a musical polymath in the truest sense of the word; primarily known as an influential practitioner of pedal steel guitar, her work is impossible to pigeonhole - all-over-the-place in the best way, from collaborations with Peter Brötzmann and Shackleton to a properly mind-bending duo of albums for Stephen O’Malley’s Ideologic Organ and Editions Mego - hers is a sound that’s both highly sensual and aesthetically aggressive, beautiful and fearless. …
Ballast
Ace Farren Ford, Dennis Duck, and Ju Suk Reet Meate (three original members) are joined by Rock ’N’ Roll Jackie (35 years in the band), John Wiese (approximately 10 years), and a cast of others form the current third phase Smegma. Personnel of this album, “Ballast”, consists of this line-up plus Charlie Mumma, a member of Sissy Spacek since 2008.The source material of “Ballast” was recorded at home and on the Los Angeles radio station Dublab, but what we hear is not exactly Smegma and Sissy Spac…
Scissors
* 2x7-inch, gatefold cover * 20th anniversary edition of Sissy Spacek's second album, first reissue since it's original release, this time as a double 7-inch in a deluxe gatefold cover. An incomprehensible, discombobulated wreck."This four-track explosion of sound had my jaw agape from the first note to the last. With minor percussive breaks between sizzling hard-wired damage, this wasn’t at all what I expected. Instead John Wiese has offered tracks that intensely re-align your senses for their …
Sissy Spacek
* 20th anniversary edition of Sissy Spacek's first album, first ever LP edition * Helicopter presents the first LP edition of Sissy Spacek by Sissy Spacek . Frantic, violent, destroyed music.
"Probably the world’s first plunderphonic grindcore record. Although in this case all of the plundering is self inflicted and self directed as they record their own blasting grind record and attack it with a razor blade and spit out a garbled, sputtering, stuttering no-wave masterpiece. Think Oval, if he on…
Hieroglyph Of Thought
This is not a lathe, just a good old hifi sounding vinyl record. Xeaxx Xeaxx is a musique concrete unit featuring John Wiese & Brace Paine. In 15 years Xeaxx Xeaxx have released one CDEP on Troniks and one 7-inch on Fast Weapons and played two shows (one in the bathroom at The Smell and I can’t recall where the other one was, but involved us both trying to get into a sleeping bag with some microphones)… 15 years later we have a new 7-inch! Maybe we will do an LP in 2048? For this recording Brace…