★Kranky
Microcastle / Weird Era Continued
Includes a bonus disc containing an entire second album recorded a few months after Microcastle, entitled Weird Era Continued. Here it is, the highly anticipated follow-up to 2007's Cryptograms album, which launched the band into the stratosphere of hype. Whether or not that was or is deserved is entirely subjective. Microcastle was recorded over the course of a week at Rare Book Studios in Brooklyn, New York with Nicolas Verhes in April of this year. The album was recorded as a four-piece consi…
Original Darkness
The latest album from the longtime Charalambides mainstay follows her Electrice album from late 2006 on Kranky as well as a split album with Pocahaunted from early in 2008. Christina Carter has a gift. In a world where most people shy away from the truth, from honesty in emotion, Christina has the strength to address those feelings head on through her music. Within the songs of Original Darkness, she confronts loneliness, self doubt, inadequacy and desire. She bares these emotions in a sometimes…
The Tired Sounds Of Stars Of The Lid
Are there other earthling-conjured soundworks rivaling the majesty of Henry Flynt's minimalist hillbilly fiddle fantasias or the heavens-rending power of Messiaen's works for organ? Undoubtedly, else why bother listening. But the only thing speaking at us right now from these charmed regions are the celestial airs of these Stars of the Lid. Alternately lulling and wielding a potency that wholly escapes 'experimental' musics, SOTL bring big, whomping chunks of sonic firmament with a sustaining, l…
Per Aspera Ad Astra
The unique pairing of the tonal feedback duo Stars of the Lid and NYC minimalist line painter Jon McCafferty. McCafferty (best known for the cover art of R.E.M.'s Green album) approached Stars of the Lid in the summer of 1995. McCafferty had done a series of paintings influenced by Stars of the Lid's Music For Nitrous Oxide. After discovering the similarity in McCafferty's paintings to the colors of sound in Stars of the Lid, Adam Wiltzie contacted McCafferty and collaboration began. In an attem…
Gravitational Pull vs. The Desire For An Aquatic Life
Reissue of the very limited LP that was on Sedimental label, with additional material added.
Avec Laudenum
Avec Laudenum was originally released on the Belgian Sub Rosa label in 2000. Adam Wiltzie and Brian McBride recorded the album via mail and by the time it was released Wiltzie had moved from Austin, TX to Brussells. Avec Laudenum marked a decided expansion of the Stars of the Lid drone methodology. The duo's use of guitars and samplers was more compositionally directed, creating long, exquisitely stretched out melodies.
Stars of the Lid and Their Refinement of the Decline
The long awaited new album from Stars of the Lid is finally ready for your sonic immersion. Painstakingly recorded, processed and assembled over the last five years, SOTL once again deliver a massive work filling two compact discs and three vinyl albums, clocking in at over two hours. While most albums of this length would be considered tedious at best, SOTL are arguably the only contemporary composers who can seemingly alter the time-space continuum simply through the playback of their organize…
Uneasy Flowers
Uneasy Flowers is the second album by Autistic Daughters, the intercontinental trio of Dean Roberts (guitar, vocals), Martin Brandlmayr (percussion, computer) and Werner Dafeldecker (guitar, bass). It is also the fourth in a series of records in which Roberts, having begun in more abstract territory in New Zealand's mid-1990s 'free noise' ferment, has embraced song, lyric and voice as vessels for topographic and psychoanalytic tracings of the impacts of territory and nomadism on the subject. Thi…