New Arrivals
#39 / Terre Thaemlitz: The Arrogance Of Optimism
Politics and the dance floor make for uneasy bedfellows, and it is this uneasiness that drives most of the work of Terre Thaemlitz, confronting head-on issues that are usually off limits in electronic music. Thaemlitz is a producer and DJ, also known under his monikers of DJ Sprinkles, Social Material, and K-S.H.E, among others. But she is also a writer, educator and activist of sorts, with very fluid notions of gender, switching continuously between male and female drag. Born in 1968, Terre Th…
Protogravity EP
PAN presents the first collaborative single from electronic composers Mark Fell and Erik Wiegand, the latter appearing under his Errorsmith alias for the first time in eleven years. Both Fell and Wiegand have contributed hugely to the development of alternative dance forms and are no strangers to collaboration; Fell alongside DJ Sprinkles and as one half of SND, Wiegand as Smith N Hack together with Soundstream and more-frequently accompanying Fiedel as MMM. The seminal Errorsmith albums from th…
On Listening
On Listening is a unique collection of forty multi-disciplinary perspectives drawn from anthropology, bioacoustics, geography, literature, community activism, sociology, religion, philosophy, art history, conflict mediation and the sonic arts including music, ethnomusicology and field recording. These specially commissioned contributions explore the many ways in which skilled listening can mediate new relationships with our physical environment and the people and other species that we shar…
Algorithms for Electronics, Fake Woodwind and Strings
“I’ve been working on an algorithmic system for live audio visual performance and composition for a few years now. AFEFWAS (3) is a sequence of five fragments of differing lengths and contrasting energies which are recordings of its output. At the heart of this system is a source of random data, in this case generated using the Cauchy probability distribution, which can be shaped by the performer both in realtime and by a careful choice of starting conditions. This data source is used to create …
Pods Of Punishment
Pods of Punishment, like parallel collection Seeds of Paradise (Idle Hands), is a journey into tube-amped molten bass and media fragments. It reveals Strategy’s strong science fiction threads and fixation on radio as a musical medium: its ghostly disembodiment, its persistent familiarity, and its spontaneous impact on the sounds around it.
"The unstoppable Paul Dickow a.k.a. Strategy shapeshifts between dub, techno and the ambient spaces between on 'Pods of Punishment' for Entr'acte. Covering al…
DS16
Daniel Leznoff and Matthew Salaciak are musicians from Montreal. Daniel iscurrently the guitarist/keyboardist in Pierre Kwenders’ touring band, a gig that has brought him to France, Italy and across Canada. Demonstration Synthesis is his anything-goes project, driven by curiosity, technology and musical freedom. Matthew has spent the last few years building a recording studio and has recently begun putting out musicunder the name Variant, a project that sees him working with Montreal native Max …
Aokigahara
Boston, Massachusetts-based Matthew Azevedo is a world-class technician, and by day engineers architectural acoustic simulations, teaches students about musical acoustics at Berklee College of Music, and occasionally finds time to master the odd record. It's this rare set of skills that can be heard on Aokigahara, an album made up of two long slabs of low-frequency drone. Aokigahara's focus on bass isn't necessarily anything new -- it positions itself alongside tomes such as Earth's seismic …
Ssingggg Sschlllingg Sshpppingg
Our favorite shaman comes back with a new solo album, recorded exclusively for Idiosyncratics. This awesome full length album by Charlemagne Palestine solo has been recorded especially for idiosyncratics. It has been brilliantly engineered by our long term associate Fredéric Alstadt (Angström Studio) and mixed by maestro Aymeric De Tapol. The artwork is an original collaboration between Charlemagne Palestine, labelboss Yannick Franck and Frau label designer Helena Dietrich, immortalized by…
Aksak
Aksak is the exciting encounter of two exceptional musicians from different generations: legendary drummer Jaki Liebezeit (Can) and percussion wizard Holger Mertin (Drums And More). Like a zen master of the minimal, repetitive beat, Liebezeit - famous for his hypnotic precision - creates with only few sound colours the perfect matrix for Mertin's unleashed playing on any imaginable percussion instrument. The result is a mighty, complex pulse - the groove of a better world. On the basis of that m…
The Deal
SUMAC is a new band who’s main core consists of Aaron Turner (Isis, Old Man Gloom, Mamiffer) and drummer Nick Yacyshyn from Baptists. Bass player Brian Cook (Russian Circles, Botch, These Arms Are Snakes) also joins the duo (as an auxiliary member) and did all the bass tracking on the band’s debut album entitled “The Deal”. An album consisting of steamroller crushing heaviness and methodical free-range technicality. SUMAC came to form when Aaron Turner had the urge to create music that’s heavy a…
Machines that kill people
Finally restocked...OUTSTANDING!!! Dark experimental electronics with ritualistic edges, one of the most important US electronic/experimental LP of the 80s (Mutant Sounds) "Massively unlikely grant-assisted archival reissue of this wild cultic/ritual psych/no wave one-off from Chicago's Ono, their debut LP from 1983, originally released on the legendary Thermidor label: Thermidor released a ton of great shit back in the early 80s Birthday Party, Meat Puppets, Minuteman, Nig-Heist but nothing co…
Hold
Like watching a massive twisting fire slowly fading into the open skies, accompanied by a drum section so repetitive yet mind-bending that you're unsure if it's ever going to stop. This is how Hold starts off, leaving you catching for your breath before the album has even reached the second track. James Welburn steps into the ashes covered in drones and noise together with drumming partner Tony Buck (The Necks), producing a crushingly epic debut album. Hailing from the UK, but located in both Be…
Procession Acts
Ross Gentry returns to Bathetic under his Villages moniker to present his sophomore LP, Procession Acts. Procession Acts carries on Villages’ debut LP’s grand expanse of ambient glory, while carrying the sound to a heightened level. Procession Acts comes across as much more cinematic. It is a denser record, more precise in its attack and its immersion. Procession Acts moves along at a steady pace, while streaking the room with beauty. It’s a rhythmic, pulsing, thumping, ticking record, that move…
The South Shore
XI Records is pleased to announce the debut full-length release from Michael Vincent Waller, The South Shore, featuring chamber works from 2011 through 2014, with album art photography by Phill Niblock. Waller has collaborated with numerous musicians and ensembles to bring this album to life. This kind of listening is for the brain to relax and enjoy, for the soul and emotions together as art for the universal. Reveling in subtext and subtlety, a symbiotic exploration of the history and future o…
Fridge Trax Plus
20th year anniversary reissue of the two milestone releases that kickstarted the entire Mego / Editions Mego imprint and initial aesthetic. This deluxe reissue brings together the first MEGO release, 'Fridge Trax' and the full length album that followed 'Live and final Fridge', originally released on Source in 1995. Made by the founders of the initial Mego label, Peter Rehberg (Pita), alongside Andreas Pieper and Ramon Bauer (General Magic) these recordings are legendary in their execution. It w…
New Wave Copy Center / How is your Popo?
The photocopier is a joy to work with — though not in your tiny apartment, and it can be expensive to maintain. That's precisely why copy centers are a great help! In Antwerp, Belgium, where Speedqueen is based, the cheapest copy centre was more akin to a darkroom than a help desk. Its two employees were depressed, almost identical goth sisters — they both had thick, red and black oil painted hair, white skin and dodgy piercings, tightly wrapped in black clothing. The smile had yet to be invente…
Menjadi
Indonesian hardcore band Senyawa board the Morphine Records mothership in early 2015, with a stunning upcoming album "Menjadi" (doser025LP). A preview appears here in the shape of a an extraordinary album track replayed by Charles Cohen's on his Buchla Music Easel. While enjoying a few months residence in Germany, Mr Cohen conducted a ritual-esq and tonal re-adaptation - flushing the song through layers of spaced out orchestrated grooves. Meanwhile in the US, explorer of the deepest depth…
Celestial Ascent
If his 1969 debut album, Dawn, offered a magical ethnic sound from an 80-string guitar-zither, American multi-instrumentalist Don Robertson's 1980 follow-up, Celestial Ascent, uses the Austro-Germanic instrument as a viaticum for a timeless journey into the depths of the soul and psyche. The album was originally released as a cassette, and this is its first reissue since then. Traditionally designed to accompany the singing of psalms in religious communities, here the zither is the perfect …
Let No One Judge You: Early Recordings From Iran, 1906-1933
Gorgeous 4LP box set presented in two gatefold sleeves inside a heavy card slipcase, with a 12” square, 20 page, saddle stitched booklet on art paper. The set is a 34-song anthology of Early Recordings From Iran painstakingly restored from 78s at Abbey Road studio in London "Ravishingly beautiful, achingly precious songs and instrumentals, ranging from two performances by the Royal Court Orchestra in 1906 — with futuristic, overlapping trumpets and exquisite clarinet improvisation — through to a…
Live at MAXXI
After their respective releases on Spectrum Spools, Italian techno masterminds Donato Dozzy (Sintetizzatrice (SP 038CD/LP, 2015)) and Neel (Phobos (SP 037CD, 2014)) return as the duo Voices from the Lake with Live at MAXXI on the motherlabel Editions Mego. A marvelous, organic live set of hypnotic, ambient techno that proves the outstanding and elegant craftsmanship of the pair's renowned sonic sculpture work. As expected, they stay true to their polyphonic topography of liquid scapes, with …