New Arrivals
Concordance (LP)
Concordance is Susan Howe’s and David Grubbs’s fifth album in the fifteen years of their unexpected and richly satisfying collaboration. Here they’ve pared down their materials to voice and piano, aspiring to the hushed intensity of their live performances. What had previously resulted from Grubbs’s recomposition of recorded materials now arrives as unadorned duo performance.
Helicotrema Index (Book + 7" flexi)
Helicotrema is a non-profit festival curated by Blauer Hase and Giulia Morucchio. Started in 2012, it presents a program of recorded audio pieces, with the aim of investigating the possibilities of an environment and a form of collective listening, as happened in the first decades of radio broadcasting. The festival is structured in a series of listening sessions, in which the audience is invited to immerse themselves in listening to compositions by international authors. Over the years the fest…
The Intimate Landscape (LP)
At the invitation of KPM Music, guitarist Ben Chasny (aka Six Organs of Admittance) whips up an emotive suite of psych-folk library music on "The Intimate Landscape". A sharp and lushly cinematic set of acoustic vignettes for fans of John Fahey, Robbie Basho et al. Since the late 1990s, Chasny's name has been synonymous with the resurgence of American folk wyrdness that saw a grip of artists across the continent pick up where John Fahey and his contemporary accolytes left off. "The Intimate Lan…
Stretch (Lp)
Forty years ago, on July 8th and 9th in 1981, a group formed by the splintering of some of Bristol's essential post punk bands, entered the hallowed studio at Berry Street in London to record their debut single. What would emerge was not only an exuberant post funk classic on the A-side, but also a wildly influential dub workout on the flipside, whose reverberations can still be heard today. Both songs have proven essential in very different ways. A focal point for the unique punk-funk that was …
Future Form, Functionless (LP)
* 350 copies * Introducing a brand new label of mutant, fusioneering styles from Edinburgh's Firecracker Recordings. The maiden voyage by Healing Force Project traverses further into the wormhole first explored in his Gravitational Lensing EP on Firecracker. A full panoply of bubbling, semi-submerged, electro-acoustic abstraction, lysergic drones and oblique, polymetric time signatures recalling the work of Italian avant-jazz outfit Gruppo d’Improvvisazione Nuova Consonanza while simultaneous…
Brace / Mend (10")
Tip! Theatric melodrama from Glasgow’s Lucy Duncombe, making a grand debut on 12th Isle sure to appeal to fans of Julia Holter, Lyra Pramuk, Enya Sibling piece to a longer, self-released tape (‘The Rapture of Cellular Accretion’), the two works of ‘Brace/Mend’ accomplish a lofty scope with soaring, consonant strings, organ and skilfully operatic vocals enacted by Lucy Dumcombe and co-produced by the artist with Kenneth Wilson and William Aikman.
‘Brace’ sees Lucy’s elegiac vocals deftly spi…
Especially Songs
Conjure in your mind’s ear a conference room with a reverberation time of 0.6 seconds. Now forget all that because The Mighty Cloud creates an entirely alien sense of time, both collapsing and expanding acoustic behavior until your conference room is a parking structure, your childhood bathroom, the Voynich Manuscript, a field. A remarkably poetic debut of subtlety and finesse, the sound-worlds meticulously fabricated by Portland’s Dave Quam (FKA Massacooramaan, Modern Melodies) and Seoul’s Joe …
Con-struct
LP version. About the Con-Struct series: Conrad Schnitzler liked to embark on daily excursions through the sonic diversity of his synthesizers. Finding exceptional sounds with great regularity, he preserved them for use in combination with each other in subsequent live performances. He thus amassed a vast sound archive of his discoveries over time. When the m=minimal label in Berlin reissued two Conrad Schnitzler albums at the outset of the 2010s, label honcho Jens Strüver was granted access to…
Demo Tapes 1984-86 (LP)
Demo Tapes 1984-86 by Heiko Maile includes a selection from his beginnings of electronic music and the bizarre sonic worlds he inhabited. Most of the tracks on this album were recorded with a basic stereo (2-track) cassette recorder. The studio set-up looked more or less like this: a drum computer (no Midi) and a sequencer were connected to each other and synchronized rhythmically. I crafted melodic sequences and rhythms and usually transposed them to the desired pitch manually, using the keyboa…
Salamanca (LP)
** Edition of 300 **Salamanca, the fifth and darkest moment in Sexores discography, is a journey through the different passages of its sound history. The Mexico-based duo creates a tribute to all the witches who were persecuted and serves as an introduction to various types of magic. The lyrics are the result of an exhaustive investigation that collects elements of folklore from various parts of the planet and absorbs an unusual power and meaning when music enters some darker passages explored b…
Electric Rag
* Edition of 300 * Maxed out and burning hot nasty, Electric Rag brings together the electric organs, electronics and alto sax of Jean-Luc Guionnet, with the closely amplified drums and percussion of Will Guthrie.After years of playing together in the minimalist pointillist free jazz noise core trio ‘The Ames Room’ (with Clayton Thomas on bass) Electric Rag offers up another point of view on a musical history of nearly 15 years of playing together.The 8 titles of Electric Rag draw on their vari…
Rastros Impensados
** Limited edition of 50 tapes, in fluorescent green edition, includes download code** Aurora Central Records proudly presents Climmma's Rastros Impensados. In the beginning of 2020, four experimental composers from different cities of Latin America got together during an event in Córdoba, Argentina. The event culminated in an intense improvisational jam between the four. One week later they got together to continue in the same vein they had taken during the improvisation, to structure it and re…
Music For Empty Rooms
* 2021 stock. Edition of 100* As the fourth Lowered album, Music For Empty Rooms has a more expanded sonic palette to include piano, cello, tam tam, singing bowls and room recordings. However it retains the bleakly ascetic sound of previous works. Developing themes of existential isolation that were explored on debut Lost Seas, new album Music For Empty Rooms takes personal experience as subject matter. The ‘empty rooms’ reference Gowers’ move to a new house in a strange town following the deat…
Sounding / Way
* This replica tape presents Pauline Oliveros & Guy Klucevsek's collaborative Sounding / Way as it was originally released, on tape, in 1986. Sounding / Way is being released at the same time as Oliveros' profound Tara's Room is released on tape for the first time since its original release in 1987 * Pauline Oliveros and Guy Klucevsek's Sounding / Way was originally released on cassette in 1987 and has been out of print ever since. The Sounding / Way concept was simple. Each artist would write a…
Narayan
** Edition of 300 ** Wildly unexpected and crushingly good turn of drone metal from Tape Loop Orchestra’s Andrew Hargreaves and collaborator ‘Metal’ Dave Rothary, with artwork by illustrator of the grim, John Powell-Jones. Narayan commit a pair of monstrous tracks years in the making and left to marinate in the vault until the stars aligned. With lockdown finally bringing the world to its knees and their pace, the time has finally come for ‘Narayan’ to seep out; presenting one side of claw-hande…
Reading The City
** Edition of 300 ** Oracle and AudioMER. are honoured to announce the release of a new LP; Reading the City with music by oracle, Laszlo Umbreit & Mira Sanders. In 2019 oracle invited artist Mira Sanders to interact with their practice through her writing. Due to the corona crisis, their shared working time couldn’t happen in the planned way: “The writing project was originally planned as an exchange while travelling together one week on the Buratinas boat, navigating on the canals and rivers s…
Mios
In 1989, pianist and composer Yumiko Morioka put together a group of diverse street musicians and semi-professional players for a project that would come to be called the Synergetic Voice Orchestra. Inspired by Yumiko’s love of different musical cultures from around the globe, the band drew on influences from India, Ethiopia, Mali, Korea and China to create an album that merged these sonic identities with more traditional sounds from the southern Japanese city of Okinawa.
Having released her sol…
Avuls
** 2021 Stock ** Longstanding collaborators & Bay Area based experimental duo Kush Arora & Lucas Patzek aka Only Now & Orogen return with ‘Avuls’, the project’s sophomore release. Building on the unearthly, black hole transmissions and creaking, exospheric ambience of their self-titled debut, Only Now & Orogen present an abyssal, elemental broadcast from another unchartered extra-terrestrial zone. Remote and astronomical yet tied to a newfound sense of rhythmic structure, ‘Alvus’ navigates a cou…
Poison Is (Not) The Word
The third entry in the 12"/MLP subs series. In early September 2011, Theme, the Poland/UK-based group centered around Lumberton Trading Company's very own Richard Johnson (ex-Splintered, Husk, etc.) and Stuart Carter (ex-Splintered, The Fields Of Hay, ex-Heroin, etc.), went into a Budapest studio with their good friends Zsolt Sörés and Jean-Hervé Péron (aka Art-Errorist of influential German group, Faust) for two whole days. The main piece, entitled "Poison Is (Not) The Word," pays witness to Th…
The Live One
XI Records is very pleased to announce the release of Tom Chiu’s new double-CD The Live One, a diverse and thoroughly engrossing album that showcases the multiple facets of Chiu’s visions. Chiu is a polymath who is as comfortable with lyricism and the beauty of tonality as he is with process-based works and challenging conventions of composition. Chiu specializes in creating spatial experiences and altered states of mind with his music, with a singular, questing path. He is a gifted improviser a…