Rock /
Ben Seretan
“I take notes from: – The cosmic awe of Alice Coltrane (and similarly Pharoah Sanders) – The unfettered squeal of Neil Young guitar solos – The bird-freedom and ear-whispering-closeness of Arthur Russell – The friendship-punk of the Minutemen – The delicious sadness of Hank Williams, Bill Callahan, and Nick Drake – The wondrous chaos of Charles Mingus’ ensembles (and how tender his ballads are) – The utter ease of James Blood Ulmer (how he just totally shreds at guitar but he’s relaxed about it …
Amusers and Puzzlers
After the release of their well-received ninth studio album, Terribly Well, and their successful month long European tour in 2013, Sightings did the unexpected and quietly disbanded without notice or explanation. More than 15 years in the trenches and making a mess throughout New York City, the band made more of a polarizing impact to formalized underground music that most of their peers. Sightings would have been a national treasure if the whole country was laid to waste in Armageddon.
Dur…
Black mountain
It’s a clicheÌ because it’s true - the greatest records are timeless. Black Mountain’s self-titled debut album is just such a record. It is a new classic rock, with reference points arcane and clear, its sound fresh, unfamiliar and irresistible. The work of a small collective of musicians operating from Vancouver, Canada, far from any industry buzz but firmly in the eye of their own storm of creativity, Black Mountain’s debut album was, of course, a beginning, but it also marked an ending. …
Elephant Ball
"For decades, Crystal Syphon were, at most, a footnote in the music history books: a name on posters from the psychedelic ballroom days, and a fond memory to those who'd seen the Merced, California band perform on the west coast circuit in the late 1960s. That changed with the release of Family Evil in 2012. Their debut album -- evidence that the mine of hidden gems from the original psych era had not yet been picked clean -- caught the ears of fans worldwide, garnering raves and equal-footing c…
The Deal
SUMAC is a new band who’s main core consists of Aaron Turner (Isis, Old Man Gloom, Mamiffer) and drummer Nick Yacyshyn from Baptists. Bass player Brian Cook (Russian Circles, Botch, These Arms Are Snakes) also joins the duo (as an auxiliary member) and did all the bass tracking on the band’s debut album entitled “The Deal”. An album consisting of steamroller crushing heaviness and methodical free-range technicality. SUMAC came to form when Aaron Turner had the urge to create music that’s heavy a…
Tangier Sessions
"The tone of the guitar and Sir Richard's gentle, loving touch with it hold forth from the first moment of Tangier Sessions, sitting clear and true in the home-recorded night air above the city. The album sequence is the precise order of the songs as they were conceived and recorded. Rick's all over the neck in the early going while sorting through the dynamics of the instrument -- in fact, guitarophiles, the first couple of songs feature Sir Richard Bishop playing without a plectrum for the fir…
Hexadic
" The only constant in Ben Chasny's longstanding Six Organs of Admittance project is change. Since 1998 he has engaged in composing, playing, improvising, and recording based on whatever aesthetic or philosophic principles appeal to him regardless of genre. More often than not, his records have existed between rather than within them, though there has always been a thread that marked a unique, if mercurial, signifier woven throughout to connect them. Hexadic is a different animal. Chasny spent s…
Kahraba
Restocked!! Kahraba is the debut studio album of Islam Chipsy's EEK. Recorded in late 2014 in downtown Cairo, it contains four tracks perfectly representing Chipsy's wild and inimitable artistic spectrum, ranging from the frenzied sound signature technique that brought him his fame ('Trinity' and 'Kahraba') to the band's individual maneuverings of typical Egyptian standards such as the Northeastern Nile delta 'Simsimiyya' in 'El-Bawaba' or Upper Egypt's traditional 'Mouled Saidi' in 'Mouled El-G…
Hearing Aid
R. Stevie Moore's music sounds like so many different things, yet like no one else. He's been making home recordings since the late '60s as an underground artist and only now is he seeing a much larger recognition of his work. His friend Jason Willett compiled this record over the course of 17 years, digging deep into Stevie's cassette catalog. Hearing Aid is a collection of Stevie's songs that cover a wide range of variety: pop genius, sublime instrumental country surf, electronic experimen…
Amor and Language
Amor and Language was one of three Red Krayola releases on Drag City in 1995 (two were from the vault: Coconut Hotel and Kangaroo?). After returning to America in 1994 and producing the first Red Krayola record since Malefactor (it was appropriately self-titled), Thompson was producing new Red Krayola material at a prolific rate -- Hazel was released the following year. When Amor and Language was in production, the pressing plant claimed to hear imperfections in the CD master.
Ourselves
Ourselves was originally recorded as a one-hour special for broadcast on London's Resonance FM but was too good to leave to the aether. Ourselves is the first collaboration between Richard and octopus-armed percussionist Neilson. The music here represents something of a return to the extended psychedelic mania of mid 90-s outings such as Asthma and Diabetes and Endekeg. "Beam" kicks off the CD with Richard ripping it up on electric guitar over a thick blanket of hand percussion, plucked…
Sings The Blues
Solo darkness from remarkably pedigreed but rarely recorded Japanese legend (Ghost, Fushitsusha, L, Marble Sheep, A-Musik, August Born, etc). Raw and gripping, like a darker version of his all-time folk-psych classic Holy Letters. Performed completely solo on voice, guitar, banjo, bass, steel guitar, and cornet, the music is almost uncomfortably blunt and rough around the edges – a “Tonight’s the Night”-like offhandedness that only serves to increase the feeling of existential seriousness. Like …
Collected Recordings
In 2009 Drifting/Falling released Gareth Dickson’s debut album, Collected Recordings, a stunningly beautiful and haunting ambient folk album which caught the attention of 12k’s Taylor Deupree. Thus began a not-as-easy-as- expected search for Dickson to try to coax him into writing an album for 12k. After a couple of cross-Atlantic voyages and a brief run-in involving a failing rental car and a herd of sheep on a dusty Scotish road, Deupree and Dickson met and Quite A Way Away was recorded for 12…
Start from Zero
Limited edition of 500 copies packaged in a heavy duty gatefold sleeve. On a long hot summer night in 2012, a meeting of minds happened in Liverpool, England. Damo Suzuki visited the city to play a show with Mugstar. After a flurry of emails, Damo asked Mugstar not to practice or figure out any music prior to the performance, as he believed it should "start from zero," leaving the whole performance to be entirely improvised on the spot. It proved to be quite a night: the shamanic presence…
African Electronic Music 1975-1982
CD version. Cameroonian musician Francis Bebey is truly one of a kind. He entered the music scene with his African compositions for classical guitar. He gave recitals while pursuing a career in journalism and then as an international civil servant. The same creative impulse also led him to write pop songs, some of which (based on novels he had written) became big hits in Africa and in the French-speaking world. But few people know that in the '70s, Francis Bebey delved into electronic mus…
j US t
Faust for all. The Krautrock legends lay down the musical foundations for everyone else to make something of their own. "j US t" -- pronounced "Just Us" -- is the new album from legendary Hamburg band, Faust. Founding members Jean-Hervé Peron and Zappi Diermaier have laid down 12 musical foundations, inviting the whole world to use them as a base on which to build their own music. The tracks presented by Peron and Diermaier are clearly, intrinsically typical of Faust in their own right, ye…
Hidden Cities
“Hidden Cities” is the second LP from Baltimore’s Horse Lords. Over the two years since their critically acclaimed self-titled debut, Horse Lords have become fixtures on the American DIY scene, touring with Matmos, Guerilla Toss, and Guardian Alien, and playing festivals such as Hopscotch, NXNE, and Fields Fest. Recorded and mixed by Chris Freeland (Wye Oak, Lower Dens), on “Hidden Cities” Horse Lords square the circle, making music that is alternately tight and loose, real-time risky and …
Intensity Ghost
Intensity Ghost is the first studio release by Chris Forsyth with the Solar Motel Band (the new group formed in the wake of his critically acclaimed 2013 solo record Solar Motel) and it's a career-defining statement of purpose and a near virtual history tour of late 20th century electric guitar, touching on widescreen psychedelia, art rock, the late-70's New York scene, and the melting pot of early 90's underground bands, but writing a whole new chapter, unforeseen by most in 2014.
Solar …
The Ann Steel Album
Mirumir presents The Ann Steel Album, a reissue of an album of Roberto Cacciapaglia compositions sung by Ann Steel, originally released in 1979 as a self-titled album credited to Steel. "So who are Roberto Cacciapaglia and Ann Steel? The former is an Italian musician who specialized in electronic composition after starting his career in the early 1970s on the edges of the krautrock scene. The latter is a Michigan-bred singer who spun into Cacciapaglia's orbit during a trip to Italy in the …
Electric Pure Land
Staggering ultra-limited out-of-nowhere double LP set of primo acid-drenched psych from the most legendary Japanese underground group of all time, the late Les Rallizes Denudes: reputedly sourced from the collection of an ‘insider’ Japanese underground musician and coming from the same source as the all-time epic France Demo Tapes LP, Electric Pure Land represents the second phase in this Dick’s Picks style on-going vinyl presentation of the hands-down greatest live moments of Mizutani’s …