★Thrill Jockey Records
Shadowland
The new material on Shadowland takes inspiration from the devotional sounds of Popol Vuh and Alice Coltrane and also possesses the pitch black weightlessness of Fushitsusha and early Tangerine Dream. With waves of guitar soaring over liquid synthesizers tones, Barn Owl combine lush, melancholic serenity with cacophonous, deconstructed guitar to exhibit a visceral meeting of light and dark. Cyclical themes were explored heavily: mantric guitar processions, swelling bass waves, and flutteri…
Night Gallery
Night Gallery III" is the first one to drop from the collaborative efforts of psychedelia power-houses, Sun Araw and Eternal Tapestry. Composed in the heat of SXSW-ian Texas and littered with odes to the Twilight Zone, the upcoming LP of the same name is the result of an improvisational drum circle recorded in one go. "Night Gallery III" is desert drone that feels cleaner than waking up in the Sahara after a peyote trip left you stranded and asking where the saxophone came from, but sort…
Beyond The 4th Door
On their Thrill Jockey debut Eternal Tapestry have delivered an album not unlike their epic live shows. Beyond the 4th Door contains long stretches of melodic guitar improvisations, dark brooding songs that slowly build and expand to allow in layers of light. The album was recorded in their home studio and was created by recording more that two hours of material, mostly live, and hand picking what you hold in your hands. There is a free and open nature to their structure creating for the listene…
Life coach
‘Life Coach’ is the debut solo album from Phil Manley (of Trans Am, Oneida, The F*cking Champs, Jonas Reinhardt). This instrumental album will certainly appeal to fans of the aforementioned bands as well as those into the classic works of Kraftwerk, Neu!, and Harmonia as well as modern Kosmische / ambient music from the likes of Arp, Mountains, The Alps and Type Records. The CD version comes in a four panel mini-LP style gatefold package. (Boomkat)
Golden Worry
"‘Golden Worry’ features new drummer Emmanuel Nicolaidis and is huge step forward from 2008’s ‘Terrible Two’. The band has kept busy touring with Beach House, Celebration, Dan Deacon, Zomes, Battles, Mi Ami, Jason Urick, and Future Islands. The CD version comes in a four panel mini-LP style gatefold package. "
s/t
In this incredible big band-style ensemble you'll find the likes of Rob Mazurek and Jeff Parker supporting trumpeter and composer Bill Dixon. Spread across three long-form orchestral narratives, featuring various horns and woodwinds, guitar, piano, vibraphone, timpanis and voice. Far from being the muddled affair it could have become, the musicians each somehow find their own space to cut loose a little within the composition, with an accommodating, airy production to match. Of the three pieces,…
Napoléonette
First LP in the Matthew Friedberger Solos subscription series. Recorded on the eighth, ninth, and tenth of October, Two-Thousand and Ten, at Key Club Recording in Benton Harbor, MI. Played on a black piano in one room, a smaller piano nearby, and an old piano in the hallway. (Discogs)
Choral
The idea of deep or detailed listening is a useful one because it’s purposefully vague. That vagueness comes in part from being understandable without needing to route it through a definition. It’s also rich enough in connotation to suggest a whole lifestyle. The idea of detailed listening is not the same as Michaelangelo Matos’ slow listening movement, but they seem to share the same spirit of deliberateness and presence. Mountains, the Brooklyn duo of Koen Holtkamp and Brendon Anderegg, …
Coil Sea
The idea for the Coil Sea record came about after Arbouretum had finished our Summer 2009 European tour. The band had some time off, and I thought it would be interesting to put a session together consisting of musicians that I knew and had played with, but hadn't all played with each other. The goal was to create improvised music without much in the way of set ideas or editorial input from my end, and to hope that we could, over the course of the session, become comfortable enough playing…
Knoxville
Documents the collaboration between CHRISTIAN FENNESZ, DAVID DANIELL & TONY BUCK for the 2009 Big Ears Festival in Knoxville, TN. Minimalist drum passages scatter over the top of textured layers of guitar & subsumed melodic sequences, eventually giving way to warm beds of evolving, tactile drones. Sonic rain showers roll into full-blown thunderstorms of effected guitar & pounding drums only to yield a field of shattered electronic & percussive debris
77 Boa Drum
An amazing feature length documentary all about Boredoms' hugely ambitious 2007 performance, orchestrating seventy-seven drummers at a park in Brooklyn, NY. Presumably for some grand cosmic reason the number 7 plays a big part in this whole enterprise. The concert itself took place on July 7th 2007 at 7:07 PM and correspondingly the documentary is 77 minutes, 777 seconds long. In addition to some great footage of this huge live show, there's plenty of rehearsal footage revealing the processes an…
Old Punch Card
Taking inspiration from early music concrete and electronic music, the BBC Radiophonic Workshop, Nuno Canavarro, Raymond Scott, David Behrman, and free improvisation, Old Punch Card is a beautifully noisy, jagged, yet stately album of synthesizer music. The ideas and implementation of Old Punch Card (the album title alluding to the electronic, faintly mechanic origins of the music) were the result of an entirely new challenge: to do something completely different from anything else he's…
O
Vinyl edition comes with 6 Exclusive tracks and a download coupon redeemable directly from the label* The long awaited full-length return of Markus Popp with a brand new album for Thrill Jockey, Having dropped off the radar over recent years , Markus Popp made a much-anticipated return under his Oval guise earlier on in 2010, delivering the Oh EP for Thrill Jockey. Now, the full-length is with us - all seventy-tracks and two hours of it. There's a very clear distinction between the Oval …
Ragged And Right
LP edition: Link Wray became the thematic soundtrack for a 2008 JACK ROSE tour with D. CHARLES SPEER & THE HELIX. Jack got so excited by the vibes emanating from these songs that he thought to break with his usual acoustic approach & enlist the Speer band to join in some unhinged & unrepentant fun in the studio. Recorded using an all live, no overdub approach, a gleaming bottle of Buffalo Trace helped shepherd them through the night. Feat. the original Helix lineup in peak form & lap steel & Ros…
Say God
The 2xLP version comes in an old-style tip-on gatefold jacket with 8” x 10” insert and MP3 download coupon. In recent years, Higgs has released a number of solo outings that can only be described as the ultimate in isolation, worlds away from the hypnotic, communal rock of his band, Lungfish. Higgs follows up the 2007 album/book release Atomic Yggdrasil Tarot with his new double album Say God. Say God is an album of gospel songs and poems as presently received by this Daniel Higgs. Recorded …
Sycamore
Sycamore is a delicate tapestry of spacious and ethereal guitar lines woven into abstract, slow-burning and multi-layered textural improvisations. The sounds blend and overlap to create richly faceted and thickly psychedelic passages, unveiling new layers of detail with each and every listen. The LP and CD will come in a deluxe limited edition for each format with artwork by illustrator and painter Arik Roper. David Daniell is a member of San Agustin and has collaborated with Loren Connor…
Thing
For fifteen years, Trans Am has forged a musical legacy that has consistently confounded those who would confine them to generic indie-rock labels and rather spoken for itself. Trans Am a-la 2010 is a band of veterans unafraid to contradict themselves, one that has grown stronger in its music and more confident in its identity over the course of now nine full length albums.
Masks
Double Dagger’s new EP, Masks, continues in this vein, taking up where their acclaimed 2009 full length, More, left off. Masks presents a series of vignettes, ranging from acerbic to facetious to self-reflective, on the facades we build within our lives. Masks contains some of Double Dagger’s most catchy songs to date, yet characteristically the tone of the album encompasses the abrasive and sarcastic as well as the upbeat and closes with a surprisingly delicate instrumental. The EP was recorded…
Luck In The Valley
LP version, presented in an old-style tip-on jacket with a hand-pasted letterpressed cover, limited edition...Like all pre-war recordings and all of Rose's releases, this album was recorded live. It was not created using overdubs but rather by recording a few 'takes' and selecting the best performance out of those. Rose stated, 'I wanted the songs to have an immediacy and spontaneity as they were being recorded. All the musicians chosen for the record know how to play the songs withou…
Boca Negra
LP version, ultralimited: For a band with only two members, this group gets an impressive variety of sounds. Rob Mazurek on cornet and Chad Taylor drummer also use the studio as an instrument, alternating between post bop jazz and near ambient soundscapes. Taylor's rhythmic sense is unerring throughout the album, whatever the tempo. Electronics are added at times, and add effect, especially at slower tempos making for spooky music along with slurred horn. "Green Ants" has sputtering …