★Family Vineyard
Henzai
Tokyo-based guitarist/singer Hisato Higuchi presents his fourth full-length and first LP release. Henzai is Higuchi at his most bare. Each song appears like a spectral poem -- sewn together with hushed electricity and whispers. This recording is wholly intimate, recorded in seclusion, and washes over the listener like a hazy, day-break dream. Higuchi splits these 12 torch-songs between slow-motion improvisations and the composed, yet each is sung with a mix of beautiful wordless/Japanese languag…
The Rocker
THE WIRE'S BEST OF 2010!
Jailbreak s the duo of pedal steel-vocalist Heather Leigh and drummer Chris Corsano. The name foregrounds the kind of outlaw violence with which the two reformulate rock-roll instants by bringing free jazz fire power to amp-humping sex beats. Their musical alliance goes all the way back to the legendary Brattleboro Free Folk Fest, the birthplace of the 'New Weird America', where Corsano and his long-term saxophone partner Paul Flaherty joined Leigh and Christina C…
Human hips and saddle bags
'Human Skab was a 10-year old boy from Elma, Washington who played African music with buckets and spoons. Thunder Hips and Saddle Bags is a 1986 cassette recorded by young Travis Roberts with his neighborhood pals and siblings. It was injected into the underground network of tape traders, zine scribes, college DJs, and freak seekers who were universally bowled over by its bewildering and utterly poignant snapshot of the mid-1980s. Skab's music -- an orchestration of pots n' pans, three string gu…
The Curse Of Midnight Mary
The horror movie-styled title and that creepy-as-you-like sketch (by Connors himself) that adorns the sleeve should hint at the kind of nefarious doings that surround the making of this long-lost Loren Connors album. According to the tale, Midnight Mary (aka 19th century Connecticut resident Mary Hart) suffered an attack and fainted, believed to be dead. Her husband had her buried only for Mary's sister to wake up at midnight having had a nightmare about her sister screaming from within the grav…
Friendly Pants
Friendly Pants is the first American release by legendary Japanese saxophonist Akira Sakata in more than 20 years. It pairs the 65-year-old traveler alongside Chikamorachi, the bombast rhythm section of drummer Chris Corsano (Paul Flaherty Duo, Bjork, Jandek) and acoustic bassist Darin Gray (On Fillmore, Grand Ulena, Brise-Glace).Since 2005 Sakata has been aligned with Corsano and Gray -- a duo equally informed by underground American rock, noise & free jazz -- and already issued two other smoke…
YMCA
YMCA is guitarist Alan Licht's first solo release since 2003's A New York Minute double CD (on XI), and his first solo vinyl outing since 1994's long out-of-print Sink The Aging Process (on Siltbreeze). Largely recorded at a 2004 concert at a Cambridge Massachusetts YMCA by Keith Fullerton Whitman, YMCA documents Licht's solo guitar set of the time -- a three-part structured improvisation that moves from mournful, layered sustained tones that sound more like a reed organ than a guitar, to a gent…
The Young Cricketer
The Young Cricketer is Chris Corsano's debut of Frankenstein-gamelan skin detail. It's a monster and a babe all wrapped under the guise of The Solo Drum Album. Corsano's flea-market kit of cast-iron pot lids, super-bouncy-balls on sticks, butter knives, and even a sax mouth-piece jammed-in-a-hose conjures a part rhythmic maelstrom, like a Milford Graves drip painting, and the sweet metallic ice drones of Tony Conrad and Keiji Haino rubbing sticks together until end days. Globally known for a doz…
Curse of Midnight Mary
Recorded between his eight volume "Unaccompanied Acoustic Guitar Improvisations" LP series & the folk albums he would make w/ Tom Hanford & Kath Bloom, these 9 pieces meld those distinct forms. Singing in a trance like moan, he reforms the Mississippi Delta blues on his acoustic guitar w/ flashes of melodic hooks & a percussive guitar style that erupts into boogie-woogie riffs & other world spirituals.
Liturgy Of Ghosts
Multi dimensional sound that blurs any line between the notions of Jazz, Improvisation, & New Music. Will appeal to patient & adventurous music fans of AMM, Spontaneous Music Ensemble, Polwechsel, Evan Parker, & the group work of Taku Sugimoto.
17 Ways
Avant-jazz group consisting of guitarist Jason Bivins, soprano saxophonist Marty Belcher, baritone saxophonist Joe Donnelly, flautist Richard Patterson and drummer Matt Griffin. The UE's carefully woven detail becomes richer with each listen, and the group's broad and unblushing sense of humor keeps this disc from devolving into self-absorbed noodling.
Aria Nativa
His 3rd solo saxophone album that merges rhapsodic avant garde music, patriotic dream verse, & morality into a frighteningly pure work of audio, visual & literary sledge. Limited to 500 copies, each contain a download coupon.
Kissing The Contemporary Bliss
For over 30 years troubadour walier DAN IRETON has called upon the spirit of 78 shellac blues n' psychedelic Stooges n' Velvets to fuel his guttural, pure soul ethos of the song. Hints at the classic forms of Dylan's Blood On The Tracks, Buckley's Starsailor & the celestial fug of Sun Ra' third-eye vision to create an approach untraveled yet increasingly influential. Kicks up the most outward bound & staggering approaches to Gus Cannon's "Walk Right In" & Robert Johnson's "Stones In My Passway" …
Two Nice Catholic Boys
...Catholic Boys" Together they unravel slow motion ghost blues across three extended pieces that evolve from the elder's martian style to the thundering, feedback splattered lead grooves of that whippersnapper. The spontaneous melodies shift from devastating, country road intimacy to hypnotic overamped rock. It's ferocious, epic, & an utter beauty.
The Moon Last Night
The Moon Last Night perfectly captures the complex and contemporary guitar style of Loren Connors - totally desolate yet wound in echoy, rich black clouds that weep of Mississippi ghost blues and chiming strings. This two part suite combines the artist's love of choral music, Giacinto Scelsi and the naked Venusian guitar style he evangelized across a string of private press LPs in the late 1980s. Conjured solely from a Fender six-string and reverb effects, solitary notes swirl and loft gently fr…
The Departing Of A Dream Vol. II
Avant guitar legend Loren Connors (aka Loren MazzaCane Connors) returns with the sequel to 2002's critically acclaimed The Departing of a Dream. The NYC blues guitarist, who has been recording and releasing albums since 1978, extends the theme (which was a loose tribute to Miles Davis' 'He Loved Him Madly') into a fragile and floating eight-part piece of acoustic/electric/ and bass guitar mixed with field recordings and the unsettling ménage of found sounds and ambient hiss. Whereas the first De…
Frowny Frown
EXCLUSIVE ADVANCE RELEASE! A could-have-been classic from John Terrill, cofounder of Bloomington's the Dancing Cigarettes. Unlike the wiry art-punk of his late-'70s band, "Frowny Frown" is a far more intimate set of homespun pop-psychedelia, recorded between 1989-99 and only hand-pressed for close friends. A halcyonic journey with rich layers of vocal harmonies (perhaps a sly nod to "Smiley Smile") that fans from Bobb Trimble to Galaxie 500 will find much to love. Includes a bonus track from '84…
Sound Works 1982-1987
Sound Works is the first collection of Jed Speare's long-form musique concrete compositions. Speare is a crossover artist who has been working in sound, video, and performance for over thirty years. The music here reflects his investigation and uniquely expressive practice of analogue sound-field recording, editing, combining and mixing during that era. He is the creator of the Smithsonian Folkways LP Cable Car Soundscapes (1982). In the early 80s he recorded with the San Francisco groups, Resea…
Everydays
Debut collaboration of New York artists and long-time duo partners Alan Licht and Aki Onda, whose combined history connects artists straddling the pop and experimental worlds, including Fennesz, Loren Connors, Takemura Nobukazu, Lee Ranaldo, and Toriko Nujiko. In the past decade their montage-inspired solo work - Licht's permutational guitar and tape pieces on Rabbi Sky and A New York Minute, Onda's field recording recontextualizations on Bon Voyage! and Ancient & Modern - has co-existed with th…
Bridge Out!
Don't call it a comeback. Bridge Out!, the first release in almost a decade by the duo of saxophonist Paul Flaherty and percussionist Randall Colbourne, is better thought of as a renewal, a reawakening of a collaboration which has lain dormant for too long. Joining forces in the late 1980s, these two New Englanders released over a dozen uncompromising and outlaw styled albums of avant garde jazz on their own and other labels that have since vanished into legend. Since then, Flaherty has expanded…
As Roses Bow: Collected Airs 1992-2002
As roses bow: Collected Airs 1992-2002 is Loren Connors' Assembly of his most melodically rich and stunning miniature compositions. Inspired by O'Carolan's airs and other Irish airs of the pAst, these works, recorded during a ten year period, are melded with the distinctly personal and iconoclAst adaptation of Connors' blues. These 43 pieces are Connors' complete airs, culled from 10 albums (eight of which are out of print) and one single, including his groundbreaking Hell's Kitchen Park (Black …