★Superior Viaduct
Monitor
Temporary Super Offer! * CD version contains album tracks + "Beak b/w Pet Wedding" single and the Darker Skratcher comp track. * An errant project of suburban Los Angeles art collective World Imitation Productions, Monitor was the sonic outlet of four young artists grappling with their terror and amazement in the convergence of the late 1970s punk scene and Southern California's consumerist decadence.
As with the collective's visual artwork and events, Monitor blends archaic influences with mode…
California Babylon
Temporary Super Offer! California Babylon is a far more sparse and caustic offering than Factrix's debut, Scheintot, documenting their live collaboration with notorious artist Monte Cazazza, who along with recording for Throbbing Gristle's Industrial label also coined its 'Industrial Music for Industrial People' motto. Originally released on the seminal Subterranean Records in 1982, California Babylon remains one of the best collections of violent guitar and primitive machine-noise resonance eve…
Scheintot
Temporary Super Offer! "Arguably the most prescient band of the entire late '70s San Francisco underground, Factrix released just one 7-inch and two pioneering LP's in the early '80s. Formed in 1978 by Cole Palme (one-time member of the LAFMS group Airway) and Bond Bergland (later of Saqqara Dogs), the two initially called themselves Minimal Man and performed a handful of shows along with Patrick Miller (who would go on to have a great solo career under the MM moniker). Soon they enlisted bassis…
Ten Years Alive On The Infinite Plain
Premiering to the world at large, Tony Conrad’s gobsmacking quintessential opus Ten Years Alive is now available to hear for the first time, featuring Laurie Spiegel and Rhys Chatham and arriving via Superior Viaduct just over a year since the death of the iconoclastic avant-garde violinist and composer in 2016
Outside The Dream Syndicate
Temporary Super Offer! Violinist, composer and filmmaker Tony Conrad started his career in New York in the early 1960s. As a member of the Theatre of Eternal Music (a.k.a. the Dream Syndicate) alongside John Cale, La Monte Young, Marian Zazeela and Angus MacLise, he participated in now-legendary and often legendarily loud drone performances with many pieces having no beginning and no end. During a fateful trip to Germany in 1972, Conrad met with avant-rock visionaries Faust and made the very fir…
Sun Ra And His Arkestra - Featuring Pharoah Sanders And Bla
Green-Vinyl reissue. "To understand the significance of the word 'featuring' on Featuring Pharoah Sanders And Black Harold, consider how infrequently Sun Ra used it and the exact way it had been used. The October Revolution in Jazz, organized by Bill Dixon in the West Village in 1964, presented a vivid cross section of approaches to the new music, including a sextet led by Ra. For the October Revolution's continuation, titled Four Days in December, held at nearby Judson Hall on the last days of …
Pokkeherrie
Emerging out of Amsterdam's vibrant squat scene in 1979, The Ex – a name chosen for the ease and speed with which it could be spray-painted onto a wall – have for four decades been an entirely self-sustaining musical entity, charting a course through the global underground with a spirit of freedom and radical exploration. On 1985's Pokkeherrie (Dutch for "terrible noise"), The Ex return to the more stripped-down instrumentation on their early LPs. A key lineup change would also see the arrival o…
Blueprints For A Blackout
Emerging out of Amsterdam's vibrant squat scene in 1979, The Ex – a name chosen for the ease and speed with which it could be spray-painted onto a wall – have for four decades been an entirely self-sustaining musical entity, charting a course through the global underground with a spirit of freedom and radical exploration. Blueprints For A Blackout, The Ex's fifth album and first double LP, combines caustic studio experimentations and loose songs from their gripping live-set at the time. The band…
Flaming Tunes
2023 repress. Post-punk, rising like a phoenix during the second half of the 1970s, was a movement that few could have anticipated or foreseen. Sophisticated, and impossible to nail down, bands like Wire, P.I.L., The Pop Group, The Fall, A Certain Ratio, Pere Ubu, Throbbing Gristle, and dozens of others, wedded forward thinking radicalism and the focused energy of punk, with revitalized forms of experimentalism that rethought the terms and ownership of the musical avant-garde. Of post-punk’s fi…
Perverted By Language
The Fall returned to Rough Trade in 1983 to release a pair of singles ("The Man Whose Head Expanded" and "Kicker Conspiracy") and Perverted By Language, their sixth proper studio album. Perverted By Language hints at the band's shift towards a distinctly pop approach, one that they would perfect via their Beggars Banquet output that immediately followed. Yet again, the force and panic of their initial Rough Trade recordings remains the foundation for much of the album. A transitional recording i…
Hardcore Vol. 2
2023 Repress. Devo's Hardcore documents the group's beginning as pre-punk outcasts in the fertile Akron, Ohio underground rock scene. Spawned at the nearby college of Kent State, site of the infamous May 4 Massacre, Devo formed as a conceptual art project armed with a radical philosophy of de-evolution. Brothers Mothersbaugh (Mark, Bob, and Jim) and Brothers Casale (Jerry and Bob) along with drummer Alan Myers soon whipped-up an otherworldly brand of "devolved blues" that could hold its own alon…
Hardcore Vol. 1
2023 repress. **Quality reissue of legendary early demos, available for the first time in over 20 years. Includes liner-notes insert with Moshe Brakha's photography** San Francisco's cherry-picking reissue label, Superior Viaduct, give new life to these crucial volumes of art-pop and pre-punk prototypes from Akron, Ohio's finest. 'Hardcore' documents the formative Devo's years, 1974-1977, of the brothers Mothersbaugh (Mark, Bob, and Jim) and Brothers Casale (Jerry and Bob) and their drummer Alan…
The Complete Yale Concert, 1966
Few copies available. Exclusive translucent red vinyl. Limited to 500 numbered copies. Includes In Concert At Yale University and Nommo with reproduction of hand-painted sleeve and historical inserts.
The late percussionist Milford Graves was one of the most unique artists the world has ever seen. Born in Jamaica, Queens in 1941, he began his career in the early '60s as a part of New York's vibrant Latin jazz scene. His focus quickly turned inward, shifting towards a practice that explored the v…
Bäbi, Nommo, In Concert At Yale University (3LP Bundle)
Just Restocked ** The three groundbreaking Milford Graves LPs in bundle at a special price. Sourced from the master tapes. First-time vinyl reissue ** Babi: By the early '70s, Milford Graves had more or less stopped gigging. Having learned his lesson the hard way in multiple-night runs like a legendary Slugs' residency with Albert Ayler, he knew that the level of energy that he put out during a performance would be difficult to sustain over the long haul. A concert was a kind of absolute ritual …
In Concert At Yale University
Bomb! Sourced from the master tapes. First-time vinyl reissue Black vinyl single LP version. The late percussionist Milford Graves was one of the most unique artists the world has ever seen. Born in Jamaica, Queens in 1941, he began his career in the early '60s as a part of New York's vibrant Latin jazz scene. His focus quickly turned inward, shifting towards a practice that explored the very nature of self. From his work in the New York Art Quartet and collaborations with Albert Ayler, Sonny …
The Complete Yale Concert, 1966
Bomb! ** Sourced from the master tapes. First-time vinyl reissue ** Groundbreaking early work from drummer Milford Graves and pianist Don Pullen – a set of long, free improvisations that were originally issued on Graves' Self-Reliance Productions label! The music is even more striking than sounds from the time on the ESP label – and also really predates some of the freer work of this type from the European scene – as Graves is a monster on the drum kit and a range of percussion, reaching out wit…
Babi
Mega Tip! **Sourced from the master tapes. First-time vinyl reissue ** By the early '70s, Milford Graves had more or less stopped gigging. Having learned his lesson the hard way in multiple-night runs like a legendary Slugs' residency with Albert Ayler, he knew that the level of energy that he put out during a performance would be difficult to sustain over the long haul. A concert was a kind of absolute ritual for him, after which he would be totally spent, emotionally and physically. Graves rar…
Pure
In the swirl of underground music emerging from Dunedin, New Zealand in the 1980s, Peter Gutteridge stands as one of the era's most intense and shadowy figures. Despite being a founding member of The Clean and The Chills, Gutteridge would eschew indie-rock fame for the hypnotic and driving sounds of his later bands such as Snapper.
Fittingly, it is Pure – Gutteridge's lone solo album of intimate home recordings – that serves as the most revealing and celebrated release of his career. As Peter Je…
Black Woman + It's Not Up To Us (2LP Bundle)
This special bundle collects the recent reissues on Superior Viaduct of two seminal albums originally released on Vortex records: Byard Lancaster "It's Not Up To Us" (LP, 1968)Sonny Sharrock "Black Woman" (LP, 1969)"Warren 'Sonny' Sharrock died of a heart attack at the age of 53 in 1994. At the time of his death, many writers noted that he had recently landed a contract with a major label (RCA) and was perhaps 'destined for big things.' In my opinion, these writers missed the point. Although Mr.…
It's Not Up To Us
Another legendary one out @Superior Viaduct, the super rare (and amazing) debut by sax / flute player Byard Lancaster on Atlantic's subsidiary label Vortex dedicated to avant-garde jazz. Featuring Sonny Sharrock on guitar. Quoting the Andy Beta's brilliant review on Pitchfork "When John Coltrane succumbed to cancer in 1967, free jazz/fire music was sucked into a giant vacuum along with him. A patron of music and patron saint to so many of its players, there was a crossroads left in his wake. Ele…