The Last Song of My Life
"This album documents a recording of Tori Kudo’s Last Song of My Life. Some may know Kudo already as prime mover in pop-naïf collective Maher Shalal Hash Baz; his history stretches back over four decades, and he’s a significant figure in the Japanese underground, thanks to his membership of groups like Noise (with his wife Reiko Kudo), Guys ’N’ Dolls, Snickers, and Sweet Inspirations. Untold numbers of said underground have passed through the ranks of Maher Shalal Hash Baz, among them members of…
Safe as Milk - 50th Anniversary Edition
Captain Beefheart's debut album, originally released in 1967, is the most accessible and pop-inflected from his entire catalogue. Still, "Safe as Milk" is a very strong and heavily blues-influenced work but it also hints on many of the features that would later become the trademarks of Captain Beefheart.
The Mirror Man Sessions
The unofficial follow-up to the debut album Safe As Milk. These are the original session tapes for the second album, issued as an expanded version entitled The Mirror Man Sessions. Featuring five additional tracks taken from the abandoned tapes.
Three Solo Pieces
'Marginal Invitation', 'Corrosions on the Surface of Life', 'Cloud Passade No. 3'. Comprised of three balanced examples of his Continuous Music technique on solo piano, Three Solo Pieces serves as perhaps the best introduction the Ukrainian-Canadian composer Lubomyr Melnyk yet available. 'Marginal Invitation' is a subdued work with a deeply rooted melodic sensibility that is rich in overtones, while 'Corrosions on the Surface of Life' exhibits a dissonant fury of patterned note play. The final, …
Creatures of the Deep
A new album of piano driven ambient music from British composer Robert Haigh. Following in the path of his albums for the Japanese Siren label, Creatures of the Deep is an underground vantage of a meeting between the musical worlds of Harold Budd and Erik Satie. With a storied musical career that has ranged widely in style — from his industrial-avant-garde works on Nurse With Wound’s United Diaries label as SEMA to his legendary ambient drum and bass records as Omni Trio on Moving Shadow — Robe…
Stalk
Paal Nilssen-Love with Lasse Marhaug, recorded and edited by Fe-mail/Spunk Hild Sofie Tafjord to create 6 fascinating free-form compositions of sound and texture. "Marhaug and drummer/percussionist Paal Nilssen Love have worked together in Vandermark's groups, as well as being co-producers of the annual All Ears improvised music festival in Oslo. Their first recorded duet, Personal Hygiene (Utech, 2005), captured their live duet at the Nu-Music festival in Stavanger and featured their shared aff…
Robot Brujo
In the wild and tangled web of sound that makes up contemporary experimental music, it can be hard to see up from down. Beyond all their obvious tasks, record labels double as a crucial lens. Ears to the ground, they build context and understanding for the disparate elements of this sonic world. Among the most notable of these, looking beyond the well trodden path, is Hands In The Dark.Over the last decade, they’ve become an unmissable force, bringing visionary and unexpected projects into focus…
Isasolo!
Four hypnotic piano iterations, a sublime cascade of keys that swells with a transcendent majesty, releasing the instrument from its harmonic shackles thru a deceptively simple gesture. Highest recommendation!
F/Ear This!
F/Ear This! was originally a double album compiled at the end of 1986 and released in 1987 by PEACE, a completely informal gathering of ziners, activists, musical groups and small Italian record labels which included Blu Bus (Franti, etc.), Particolare Music (Plasticost), Rockgarage, Trax (Vittore Baroni, Piermario Ciani, etc.), Ut / communications (Giacomo Spazio), Catfood Press (Marco Pandin) and Tunnel Records (Detonazione).Marco Pandin was responsible for collecting the material. The idea fo…
The Last Five Minutes
Following an input by Marco Pandin, Alberto Carozzi recorded four minimal pieces on electric guitar, improvising on the concept of playing as less as possible. The four pieces then became five with the collaboration of Matteo Uggeri, who added tribal beats and weird samples. He then mixed the whole album, entitled The Last Five Minutes, an invitation to manage tension through patience.
Gratitude
Martina Verhoeven has been working on the development of her own photographic style for about 20 years, almost parallel to this process Martina took up the electric fretless bass when recording the two criticaly-acclaimed 3 Seconds Of Air albums (with Dirk Serries). As her photography continues to grow, expand and develop, slowly mutating into collages on canvas, so does her approach to music. Switching from electric bass to double bass to piano, she slowly mastered a technique that's exceptiona…
Music For Laboratories
**200 copies, tip!** Music For Laboratories is a project by Orlando Lostumbo - a Roman double bass player and composer - who, for this work, has chosen the moniker of Spheric. For the realization of Music For Laboratories, the artist has been inspired by his working environment, a research institute - the Istituto Superiore di Sanitá - where, for over thirty years, he has been working as an employee at the internal library, one of the most important in the biomedical field in Italy. The ongoing …
Cimora
Over the last decade multi instrumentalist Tomás Tello has been developing his own personal music style based around an exploration of the guitar and his intense personal investigation of traditional Peruvian music - in particular Andean culture which he grew up with. Now operating out of Tavira, Tomás has been functioning like a psychic musician, a well tuned antenna picking an unique sound universe where, among others, sounds of native instruments (quenas, drums, charangos) and experimental el…
Post Internet Blues
Post Internet Blues is UK group Gad Whip's latest album, following several low-key cassette albums released since 2014, plus the four tracks that constitute 2017's limited edition In A Room EP. Gad Whip blend avant-garde sensibilities with a contemporary take on the place where D.I.Y. culture meets post-punk, hints of deconstructed garage rock and interstellar voyaging through sweat-drenched waking dreams. Immediate, powerful, confounding and kept in place by wry, sometimes observational, vocals…
Primitive Emotions
A collection of Alternative TV songs during recent years that have appeared on vinyl-only releases or compilations and suchlike. Includes This Little Girl, Negative Primitive, The System, Radiator, Walls, and Chinese Burn, amongst others. Chinese Burn will be a different version to the one which appears on the Low Expectations compilation 10" on Fourth Dimension. Even if you own some of the vinyl, this will be a neat way of listening to the tracks as they map out an arc in the group's more recen…
Scars On Sunday
Mark Perry has overseen the reissue of 1979's Scars On Sunday, which was originally released as a limited run cassette and is now highly collectible. Comprising material from around the same period as the excellent Vibing Up the Senile Man album period, the ideas behind the music were very much informed by Mark's experience of touring with Here & Now. Perhaps serving as a statement on punk, or the many hordes by this time now completely straitjacketed by it, it could be contended it was conceptu…
Lust In Peace
Advancing the post-punk infused concoction of blazing garage and art-driven destructs-rock, as established on Hand & Leg's grinding self-titled debut from 2017, the bass and drums are here cranked to new heights of molten activity. Murky shades of sexual negativity plough forth with the help of obsidian distortion, careering bass dirges so scuzzed they can clog arteries, ungodly squalls of paint-stripping noise, and a tendency towards playful rhythmic rituals themselves only offering brief respi…
The Great Unlearning
Double-CD version of the critically acclaimed The Great Unlearning album, originally released in mid-2019 as a double-LP by Egyptian label Nashazphone (NP 030LP). This release saw Gary and Anthony not only reunited with Stuart Dennison, Martyn Watts, and Philip Best, but also collaborating with Philip's wife (and Consumer Electronics partner) Sarah Froelich and delivering perhaps their most surprising and immediate work to date. Drawing from post-punk, ravaged psychedelia, raw electronics and, o…
Dark Places
** Coloured ** Mark Perry has remained the sole surviving original member and driving force. Alternative TV have been responsible for around fifteen albums since their formation, with the last one, Opposing Forces (2015), proving to be their strongest thus far, marrying of igneous rock, idiosyncratic touches, barbed commentary, and occasional seething undercurrents of dark psych. Dark Places introduces four songs cascading between full-on rock to a kind of abstract minimalist electronics appro…
It's Never Alright / Kerb Krawler
For many years now Fourth Dimension Records has forged a strong relationship with both Gary Mundy and Anthony Di Franco of Ramleh by virtue of support for their respective solo endeavours, Kleistwahr and JFK. After having released a large proportion of their albums under these guises it then only made sense that a Ramleh record itself for the label would be mooted. This single grew out of these discussions and follows on from 2019’s critically acclaimed The Great Unlearning 2LP on Nashazphone, w…