★Locust Music
improvika
By trade Sir Richard Bishop is a dealer of rare occult books and fine paper ephemera. For many in the musical cosmos, he has occasion to travel the smoke filled carnie circuit as 1/3 of the Sun City Girls medicine show. But in the twilight hours of a shadow world sensed only by few, Bishop is a dazzling unaccompanied guitarist. On Improvika, Bishop rides a very tall horse through a surrealist's cowboy set that's 1 part bruit Peckinpah muscularity & 2 parts illuminated Jodorowskian symbolism. A v…
WOODEN GUITAR
A simple title with a simple concept. Wooden Guitar is an inspired excursion into the creases and folds of modern deltadelica & a thinly veiled homage to the great Takoma compilations of yore (remember that great Kottke, Lang, Fahey collection?) where guitarists could sit back, work those muscles in their fingers and go the extra musical distance. Four of the great worldwide guitarists -- Germany's Steffen Basho-Junghans, Seattle's Sir Richard Bishop (the Sun City Girls), Japan's Tetuzi Akiyama …
Eight electronic pieces
Reissue of a 1961 Folkways electronic music album. "Tod Dockstader assembled this terrifically unique and fresh collection of synthetic analog sound for release back in 1961. Dormant and nearly forgotten for some 40 years, Locust brings this gem back into print for another go around you won't want to miss out on. Dockstader has been characterized by many as a true antecedent to the techno and ambient electro scenes popularized by the likes of Aphex Twin, a visionary figure who the Washington Pos…
Desert ambulance
this is an album from none other than recently rediscovered early electronics guru Ramon Sender. After last year’s critically revered ‘Wormfood’ album also on Locust, this is yet another slice of otherworldly musical brain candy. Side A, entitled ‘Kore’ is an expertly made journey into tape music, reminiscent of Delia Derbyshire’s work for the BBC Radiophonic Workshop (as heard in the recent Mute reissuses of the Doctor Who compilations) and also the work of Morton Subotnick and Pauline Oliveros…
Worldfood
Worldfood is a wild, psychedelic warble & drone of looped, overlayed tape pieces produced by 'goosing' an ampex tape player with a computer calibration device. The resulting two pieces -- 'Worldfood vii (To See With my Eyes)' and 'WorldfoodXii' -- both part of a number of variations in a series -- make for gorgeous, careening sungazing music. Leave your glasses behind. Ramon Sender is a legendary figure in the Bay Area scene -- first paving the way for the San Francisco Tape Center with Morton S…
Reads Jazz In Canada
On a single October evening in 1959, fabled people's poet Kenneth Patchen and Vancouver's Alan Neil Quartet made a little bit of history. Together, they cut one of the first jazz-and poetry recordings to disc -- fiery, spontaneous and free of pretensions, where hard bop playing wailed neck-and-neck with Patchen's scathing, slurred, rabid vocalizations. Today, many see Jazz In Canada as among the very first truly beat documents on record -- preceding efforts by Kerouac, Ferlinghetti & Ginsberg. T…
Agitation
two albums of 'agitprop' electronic music -- Tract & To Kill A Sunrise cut between 1968 and 1975 -- by mysterious & controversial Turkish composer Ilhan Mimaroglu -- one of the truly underrepresented pioneers of the golden age of the Princeton-Columbia electronic music scene. Produced as a direct reaction to an extended period of intense repression, counterrevolutionary terror, & execution style murder in Turkey, Tract is a scrambled mash up peppered with spunky electronic bursts, radio ads loop…
Electronic kabuki mambo
Electronic Kabuki Mambo is a stupefying pre-psychedelic vintage 50s affair featuring a tapestry of then local musical talents (One Henry Jacobs, Gordon Longfellow, David Talcott, and William Loughborough). Prepare yourself for a liberation of your senses. Prepare for an irresistible taste of the 50s in all of it's sonic sci-fi glory because this caravan of sound is where head music really began! Think Taj Mahal Travelers meets Harry Partch in an echo chamber. Think?Think? It's difficult to belie…
Purified by the fire
a drone masterpiece, The psychedelic sounds of musical pioneer Henry Flynt's drone works with collaborator C.C. Hennix are quietly becoming the stuff of legend. Over some 40 plus minutes, we are treated to a true tour de force that's part Hindustani inflected musical miasma and part warped hillbilly vibrational swing that sways in and out of auditory focus. This is vertiginous music for the third ear. Line Up: Henry Flynt (Violin); C.C. Hennix (Pandit Pran Nath Tamboura)
Metal notes
Metal Notes resuscitates a long-lost, decades-old cassette-only release by the great New York collective Gamelan Son of Lion and brings to the fore the incredible metallic drones of a group whose innovative minimal music has rightfully earned them a place among the likes of La Monte Young, Tony Conrad, Steve Reich & Charlemagne Palestine -- to name a few. At almost 80 minutes, this collection of eight songs is nothing if not totally spellbinding & hypnotic. Features founding members Barbara Bena…
The complete gamelan in the new world
This is the first proper re-release of two legendary recordings by the innovative Gamelan Son of Lion. This New York performance group has counted as its founding members Fluxus pioneer Phillip Corner, electronics composer Daniel Goode (Tzadik), and core member Barbara Benary. Equally inspired by the resonant decaying sounds of New York school composers like Morton Feldman, the stunning pacific gamelan music of its namesake & the wild antics of Fluxus, their sound is trancelike and beautifully i…
Object 1
The Object series is Locust Music's shot at documenting worldwide currents in creative improvisation and composition but as you may expect by now, we're doing it with a twist. For each release in this ongoing series, we've worked with the musicians to arrive at audio-visual ties between sounds and objects that may indicate a visual tie to the music. In this case, a bowling ball and a Brill-o pad grace the cover. Object 1 teams together trumpeter Axel Dorner, an internationally celebrated …