★Light In The Attic
Mambo Nassau
After 1979’s Press Color – reissued by Light In The Attic – Lizzy Mercier Descloux went tropical. Mambo Nassau, released in 1981 on ZE Records, saw the vagabond Parisian poet, artist and musician decamp from New York to the Bahamas with her manager Michel Esteban.
The effect on her music was not as expected. Press Color had been an album of dissonant, distorted disco influenced by the New York no wave scene, but Chris Blackwell’s Compass Point Studios provided a hermetically sealed environment i…
Suspense
By the time bohemian singer/poet/artist Lizzy Mercier Descloux recorded her fifth album, 1988’s Suspense, she’d enjoyed a recording career that was as far from the clichés of music lore as is possible, flitting between genres, continents and collaborators, enjoying great success and equally great failure and even stealing the final breaths of master trumpeter Chet Baker for 1986’s One For The Soul. When she came to make Suspense – reissued here as the final album in our series – she was, for the…
I'm The One
Masterpiece!!! I'm The One, you don't have to look any further. I'm The One. I'm here, right here for you,' oozes jazz, rock, and electronic music pioneer Annette Peacock on the leadoff title track of her solo debut LP. The album's wide range of vocal emotions and diverse sonic palette (featuring Robert Moog's early modular synthesizers, which the singer actually transmitted her voice through to wild effect) places it firmly at the forefront of the pop avant-garde. Originally released by R…
Cochin Moon
Yes, you’re reading this correctly. A legit, non-bootleg vinyl reissue of one of the holy grails of fourth-world avant-ambient synthesis, and believe it or not, this was a Record Store Day release in Japan this year. Originally released a few months after Haruomi Hosono’s 1978 Paraiso LP — famous for featuring the first trio grouping of the band that would become Yellow Magic Orchestra — Hosono’s Cochin Moon, an album credited to himself and famed graphic artist Tadanori Yokoo, who provid…
Live at Trans Musicales, Rennes, France, 7th December 1996
If a music critic could design their own super group, it might look something like the one that released the experimental, unique, and pulse-quickening 1996 album Cubist Blues. The trio–Suicide’s Alan Vega, Big Star’s Alex Chilton, and singer-songwriter Ben Vaughn–are outsiders each and cult heroes in their own right. Their unlikely union happened in December 1994 in a fog of cigarette smoke at two barely-lit, all-night improv sessions at Dessau Studios in New York. After that fateful session, t…
Bob Frank
Originally released in 1972 on Vanguard Records, Bob Frank’s self titled debut album took elements of Dylan, Johnny Cash, and Ian Tyson and filtered it through a pot-smoked haze infused with Frank’s long-time friend, Memphis guru Jim Dickinson. Dickinson and Frank shared a mutual admiration that ran so deep that on Dickinson’s own 1972 debut album Dixie Fried (released on Atlantic Records) he recorded one of Bob’s songs, ‘Wild Bill Jones.’ Despite the Dickinson/Memphis connection, Bob Frank’s on…
Press Colour
"All tracks newly remastered. Liner notes by Vivien Goldman. Lizzy Mercier Descloux may have come of age in Paris, but it's in New York's Lower East Side that she really came alive. The French punk pioneer, a friend of Patti Smith and Richard Hell, moved to New York in 1977 and soon immersed herself in avant-garde poetry, performance art, and punk music. Closely associated with the founders of ZE Records (home to Was (Not Was) and Kid Creole & The Coconuts), Descloux released her debut alb…
Don't Just Sing - An Anthology: 1963-1999
Outstanding reissue. CD version. House in deluxe gatefold Stoughton tip-on jacket. Newly remastered audio. Includes rare archive photos and liner notes Q&A with Krog. The work of Karin Krog may be unfamiliar to much of the world, but in her native Norway and Scandinavia at large, she's practically a household name. This says much about the local enthusiasm for post-bop jazz but also about the tyranny of distribution: until 1994, Karin Krog's albums weren't available in the USA or UK, meaning thr…
In My Own Time
Recorded over a six month period in 1970/71 at Bearsville, In My Own Time was Karen Dalton's only fully planned and realized studio album. The material was carefully selected and crafted for her by producer/musician Harvey Brooks, the Renaissance man of rock-jazz who played bass on Dylan’s Highway 61 Revisited and Miles’ Bitches Brew. It features ten songs that reflected Dalton's incredible ability to break just about anybodys heart – from her spectral evocation of Joe Tates “One Night of Love”,…
Native North America (Vol. 1): Aboriginal Folk, Rock, and Countr
Largely unheard, criminally undocumented, but at their core, utterly revolutionary, the recordings of the diverse North American Aboriginal community will finally take their rightful place in our collective history in the form of Native North America (Vol. 1): Aboriginal Folk, Rock, and Country 1966–1985. An anthology of music that was once near-extinct and off-the-grid is now available for all to hear, in what is, without a doubt, Light In The Attic’s most ambitious and historically signi…
I am the Center: private issue new age music in America, 1950-90
One of the best things about Seattle label Light in the Attic’s new new age compilation I Am the Center is that it doesn’t try and pretend that new age music was something that it’s not. Look at the album’s cover illustration and you’ll see an angel-like creature carrying an orb of yellow light through the clouds; open the gatefold and you’ll see what appears to be a bird made of stars launching itself out of the ocean. Press play and be delivered into over two hours of mind-numbingly mellow mus…
Wrecked Again
LP version. 180 gram vinyl in a tip-on gatefold sleeve. Remastered from the original tapes. Includes unseen photos and liner notes by Andru Chapman. "1971's Wrecked Again, Chapman's final for EMI's seminal stoner imprint Harvest, home to Kevin Ayers and Syd Barrett. Like other artists in the stable, Chapman's music contains a drugged-out feel, sublime guitar playing and intense lyrics, yet Chapman's career was not a pet project. Buried in EMI's release schedule and afforded no promotional budget…
Rainmaker
The day has come! We’re kicking off 2012 with a deluxe reissue of Michael Chapman’s debut Rainmaker. Originally released on Harvest Records in 1969, Rainmaker is a psychedelic-guitar-folk delight. Featuring some of Chapman’s best loved songs, “It Didn’t Work Out,” which features a stellar cast of legendary English musicians of the era; Guitarist “Clem” Clempson was in the prog-band Bakerloo (soon after playing with Chapman he’d join jazz-rockers Colosseum and then Humble Pie) Drummer Aynsley Dun…
Fully Qualified Survivor
"Although not as well known as his peers (Roy Harper, John Marytn, and Bert Jansch), the name Michael Chapman is an important one in the linage of English folk rock guitarists and singer/songwriters of the late '60s/early '70s. For those unfamiliar with Chapman's work, Roy Harper might be his closest musical cousin (and both artists were signed to EMI's seminal stoner record label Harvest -- also home to Kevin Ayers and Syd Barrett). Like other Harvest artists, Chapman's music contains a …
Directions To See A Ghost
“The Black Angels bring the aura of mid-1966 the drilling guitars of early Velvet Underground shows, the raga inflections of late-show Fillmore jams, the acid-prayer stomp of Austin avatars the 13th Floor Elevators everywhere they go, including the levitations on their second album, _Directions to See a Ghost. Mid-Eighties echoes of Spacemen 3 and the Jesus and Mary Chain also roll through the scoured-guitar sustain and Alex Maas’ rocker-monk incantations. But he knows what time it is. ‘You say …
Jazz Raga
Awesome reissue! The world famous Impulse jazz catalogue is so cavernous you truly need a music-minded flashlight to uncover its deepest and darkest secrets. Thankfully Light In The Attic has recently acquired such luminescent technology and the first discovery is Hungarian guitarist GABOR SZABO’s 1967 Indo-fusion landmark, Jazz Raga. combines Szabo's distinctive 6-string touch & open-minded ideas. It brings together jazz, pop-rock & his native European influence, along with hypnotic sitar, st…