New Arrivals / Last 2 weeks
Atlantis
2024 Stock. On their fourth album, counting the limited vinyl-only Live At The BBC (RLP 2118LP), Elephant9 join forces with Reine Fiske, the quite excellent Swedish guitarist from Dungen, The Amazing and Träd, Gräs och Stenar, for yet another heavy slice of mindblowing modern rock'n'jazz psychedelia. Writers have called upon names like Tony Williams´ Lifetime, Deep Purple, Brian Auger and early '70s Miles Davis to describe Elephant9's music, pointing to the fact that they are comfortable in both…
Waves
Elina Bolshenkova (aka Eli!) is an activist, artist and musician from Russia who currently resides in Georgia. Her previous long player ‘Flood Management’ was released by the indefatigable Infant Tree label. It is a dangerous time to be an outspoken artist in Russia, so Elina is happy to keep to the shadows for now. The title for the album is taken from a novel of the same name by Soviet-Russian science fiction writer/brothers Arkady and Boris Strugatsky who were renowned for their fictional fut…
A Cake of Ashes
Featuring the last recording of the organ in Phipps Hall before it was moved to a church in Ripon.Recorded at James Creed's Living Room, Phipps Hall HuddersfieldThomas Carroll - reed organ, pipe organ, decoupled organ pipes, electronicsMia Windsor - piano, decoupled organ pipes, electronics
Loop Blood
*50 copies limited edition* Active since the late 1970s, Rosa Arruti was a member of bands like Mohochemie, Tendre Tembles and Psicópatas del Norte. Since 2000, Arruti has been working on her solo project, Nad Spiro, delving into experimental electronic soundscapes and crafting intricate guitar textures. Known for collaborations with international artists like My Cat is an Alien and Atsuko Kamura, her work has been released on labels such as Geometrik Records. Arruti's music is recognised for it…
Dis Fac
Dis FAC is the first release of an eponymous project which sees Andrew Hulme (co-founder of O Yuki Conjugate) reunited with Tom Fazzini for the first time in 20 years since their previous group A Small Good Thing (active 1989 - 2002).
A Bridge Over The Lagoon
Dean Brown is best known as Little Skull. A basement Florian Fricke, creating grainy chamber miniatures with the same latticework intricacy as the delicate handmade dioramas that serve as the covers of his records. He was (is?) also a member of Nova Scotia, purveyors of reed-heavy skree clouds - a band whose existence feels more like a rumor than a fact and one of the final acts on Peter Stapleton's Metonymic label.
Ben Spiers mostly performs solo and has produced a spartan architecture of lonel…
Open Today
Kumio Kurachi is a Japanese singer-songwriter who has been active since the 1980's. This is his 11th solo album and only the second to be released outside of Japan following Sound of Turning Earth (2018) on bison.
Smetana
Returning to the Czech Republic with a reissue of Richter Band’s first album, Smetana (Czech for ‘Cream’), released originally in 1990. Pavel Richter gained a considerable reputation as a guitarist, playing in a number of Czech avant-garde rock groups, including Švehlík, Marno Union and Elektrobus, and became one of foremost figures of the Prague scene which opposed the socialist regime of the 70’s and 80’s. Towards the mid 80’s, he began to focus on calm music and subtle sound structures, playi…
Little Skull
*200 copies limited edition* Aotearoan expat Dean Brown has been slowly growing the Little Skull catalogue for the last 21 years. His sound belongs to the Aotearoan underground tradition, folding in elements of portastudio rock, folk and noise. As well as HoP his works have appeared on Planam, Elica, Digital Regress and Anomalous. These two tracks find Little Skull staring into space with his toes in the sand as he conjures a tumble-down cosmic blues dusted with tape hiss and distortion. As usua…
Petals
"On Petals, the pair’s haunting folk music comes into sharper focus while broadening their sonic palette. Spoken word meets chanted incantations, gently fingerpicked acoustic guitar is placed alongside spindly piano melodies, the creak of floorboards in the background mirrors the creak of fingerprints dragged across guitar strings. Woven throughout are bursts of tape-recorded radio static that reveal hardly distinguishable voices while MacDougall sings of equally fleeting phenomena. Winds, breez…
Gipping Through the Ages
This Norwich-based trio hit our radar earlier this year when we caught their third live performance in London. Gipping Through the Ages is their debut release.
Ghost In A Broken Shell
Michał Jan Kozłowski is a post-conceptual artist born in Warsaw, Poland in 1986. He began making music at the beginning of the millennium, founding rockabilly band Flymen, releasing tracks on punk labels and gigging throughout the early decade of the 2000s. Later in London he started an improvised noise duo, Unknown Unknowns, with fellow visual artist James Lander and with those who wish to remain anonymous. TV Sunset is his new retro-futurist project. According to Kozłowski, "Ghost in a Broken …
Kosmischer Pitch
"Like the cosmic compositions it delicately references, Kosmischer Pitch is proof that the higher and lower pleasures can triumphantly combine.” - The Wire Magazine
MPU105
Ilian Tape kicks on with another entry into its ITX Series, this time with a lovely hand-stamped long player from MPU101. It is a deep dive into escapist ambient worlds with plenty of grainy tape hiss and cosmic static, celestial melodies and provocative moments of introspection. Analogue machinery is really brought to the fore on fuzzy sounds like 'CreamyPORTAL-Xa' with patient and pastoral synth smears, while 'APEX CA 91352' has brighter and more mellifluous melodies rising up through the mix.…
Triple Pocket Napkin Fold
“From the opacities of poetry and withheld language emerges this collection of folded, layered, improvised, imperfect, and unexpected forms of address: mud dancing, whispers, shouts, laughter, screams and vocal sound making that resist the order of speech.”
Syne Vuyle Hoeck
*300 copies limited edition* The Ghentian skyline has low peaks and hides its horrors in full view ~ walk streamside and you’ll quickly be confronted with façades that leer with their tales and secrets, the angels and demons that built this city holding up its mortar and stone in an inextricable embrace. It is within this incongruous backdrop that Benoît Monsieurs has fostered the Venediktos Tempelboom persona. Using the 12-string guitar as his main instrument, the self-taught musician creates p…
A Shaw Deal
Some things take a long time. And some things are meant to last. But how you know that, or learn how to find out, that’s a more intangible thing. That’s A Shaw Deal – intangible. A communal meeting place for two old friends and their different musics. A Shaw Deal is the first album by Geologist and DS. They go back a long ways – back before Highlife, before Shaw joined White Magic – back to the early childhood of Animal Collective. Basically, Doug Shaw touched down in NYC around 2003, and he and…
Ku
*2024 stock* The act of conjuring remarkable sound from found objects is at the very heart of this recording from American musicians Greg Davis and Jeph Jerman. Having met in Arizona some years back, Davis and Jerman commenced working together on a series of recording projects.
Improvising with a range of implements and devices ranging from sticks, stones and low-fi electronics to prepared instruments, gongs and broken percussion, the pair sought to develop a personal language that reflected th…
A Picturesque View, Ignored
*2024 stock* Echoes of disconnected sound reverberate meshing together into a cascading river of intersecting sound elements – occasionally confrontational, ultimately unforgettable.
s/t
Strzał w kolano (eng: Shot in the knee) is a solo project of Jakub Majchrzak (ex Kurws) that began with a concert in Lisbon back in 2017 and has recently been revived. The foundation of this project is a classical guitar (tuned quarter-tone) connected via a piezo microphone to separate guitar amplifiers. The signals emanating from the amplifiers are given distinct identities through horizontal and vertical processing or static manipulation within the texture of the sounds themselves.
Conceptuall…