New Arrivals
Ritual Totemic Stone
By now, the significance of Sam McKinlay's extensive body of work is undeniable. After having begun his mapping of the depths of monomania, fetish, addiction, and vice, in the mid-1990s with his flagship project, The Rita, McKinlay briefly halted his work in the early 2000s. Though it was unforeseeable at the time, McKinlay's return to substantial recording output and live performances around 2004 would quickly and permanently alter the landscape of Harsh Noise. The Rita became one of the most …
Erm
In the summer of 2011, I wrote to Francisco López to ask him whether he would be interested in working together on a project. He agreed but on condition that we worked on two separate tracks but using the same sound sources. These sound sources could be processed any way we liked, or even used in their original form, so as to highlight the aural roots of the tracks while at the same time exposing our different sonic approach. LUCA SIGURTÀ The end result is a split album comprised of …
Traces Two
2014 repress, Recollections GRM presents four "forgotten" and compelling electro-acoustic pieces from the institute's world famous archive. Recollection GRM, a label within the Editions Mego family of labels, offers a second selection from the vast archives of Groupe De Recherches Musicales (GRM). "The idea of the Traces series is to unearth from the GRM Archives short, forgotten, or ignored pieces of music. This second volume, which gathers works prior to 1976, features the 'early' works of f…
Breve Retraite Au Couvent Sainte Marie De La Tourette
This recording documents a sound-performance curated by Franck Ancel in homage to Varese’s « Poeme Electronique ». This musical milestone was commissioned for the Philips Pavilion created by Le Corbusier and Xenakis on the occasion of Expo’58, the Brussels World’s Fair that was held from 17 April to 19 October 1958. Le Corbusier envisioned an “art total’’ utopia involving space, music and images all at once. As soon as he was hired by the dutch company, he announced his intent to create an « ele…
The Spanish Suite
2012 Re-release "The Spanish Suite was written to magnify the contribution that Moorish Spain made on the European Renaissance. The relationship of music to cosmic rhythms and harmony was altered from the original state of Spanish music and eventually distorted down to the 12 tone equi-temperment system of tuning. The Artistic Heritage Ensemble was taught to play outside of the 12-tone system and to recognize natural tone relationships. The musicians had to be dedicated to music for life …
Arghiledes
Arghiledes' is a brilliant homage to Greek Rebetiko music of the early 20th century by No Neck Blues Band's David Shuford aka D. Charles Speer. It's his 2nd solo LP under this moniker and a deeply researched, beautifully executed effort replete with in depth sleeve notes and paste-on cover. Coming from a Blues playing American of Greek descent, the project reflects the syncretic nature of Rebetiko music, itself made up of the many disparate elements which formed Greek urban folk music (European …
Lines Describing Circles
Over the past year as Peder Mannerfelt has shed the skin of The Subliminal Kid, we've only had small samples to taste of his new brand of musical sorcery. Lines Describing Circles changes all of that. Ten tracks deep, this is not so much an album as it is a declaration. From the opening, harrowing crackle of "Collapsion," Mannerfelt's intent is to crush the listener into a perfect metal cube. Lines Describing Circles displays the sound of a man fully in control of his machines. Throughout th…
Re-Engineering
Steven Warwick aka Heatsick cocks a unique and compelling perspective on contemporary dance music with his bold follow-up to 'Intersex', a gorgeous, layered work that those of you into DJ Sprinkles should check out without delay. Now woven with leaner dancefloor muscle, the deeply funked views of 'Re-Engineering' are characterised by the artist as a "cybernetic poem". We can take this quite literally in his use of spoken word in pieces such as 'Re-Engineering' with its Chris Morris-esque wordpla…
Qat, Coffee & Quambus: raw 45s from Yemen
Compiled by Chris Menist, Qat, Coffee & Qambus: raw 45s from Yemen features vintage oud and vocal music inspired by the qat-chewing, coffee-sipping, qambus-playing culture of Yemen. Although part of the classical Arabic musical tradition, the music of Yemen takes its rhythmic lead as much from the East African coast (a mere 20 miles across the Red Sea) as the surrounding Arab Peninsula.Little has been written about the music and culture of one of the world's oldest civilizations, and each 45rpm …
Testacoda
Jérôme Noetinger is an improviser and composer of electroacoustic music based in Rives (near Grenoble), France. He plays Revox, tapes and radio. SEC_ is the moniker of Mimmo Napolitano, an electronic musician and sound engineer from Naples, Italy. He plays Revox, no-input feedback, laptop, electronic devices. Together these two play the kind of improvised electronic mayhem that put Europe on the map. Testcoda features two separate recordings of shapeshifting electronics. One side recorded…
Paranoid Cat
Paranoid Cat is Philadelphia guitarist Chris Forsyth's third solo album and first for Family Vineyard -- a sprawling, harmonically-charged side-long suite backed by a clutch of compositions merging raw and delicate American roots traditions. After more than a decade trotting the globe and recording with a mess of today's avant garde greats, plus co-leading the brazenly absurd Peeesseye, Forsyth has arranged a full-band to accompany his electric six-string vision of interlocking arpeggios and max…
Japlan
Der Plan were invited to Tokyo in 1984 to play six concerts for Seibu, a Japanese department store chain. Seibu were staging a “German Week”. But how did they come to choose Der Plan, of all bands? Why not an Oktoberfest combo or the Scorpions? Moritz Reichelt explains: “German New Wave was really popular in Japan. They knew more about it than people here at home. Catalogues and magazines detailed every obscure record and depicted the covers. This particular department store chain was linked …
Instruments non-electronique
A collection of the earliest recordings of the French sound sculpture musicians and Cristalists known as Structures Sonores Lasry-Baschet. Featuring the first fruits of one of the greatest unisons in experimental French music combining the beguiling haunting sounds of Jacques and Yvonne Lasry and the development of the musical inventions of Bernard and Francois Baschet. Exploring a similar route to that of early Michel Magne recordings (and often likened to “a French Harry Partch”) the emotive m…
Brokeback And The Black Rock
In the fall of 2010, when Douglas McCombs convened a new version of the band, Brokeback hadn't played a live show for more than two years and had not recorded any new music for eight. The band, a long-running side project for Tortoise and Eleventh Dream Day's Douglas McCombs, had stiffened up, sometimes getting lost in a welter of meticulously constructed electronics. McCombs's idea was not to start over, exactly, but to start fresh, approaching similar harmonic content from a different directio…
Red Riding: In the Year of Our Lord 1980
Blackest Ever Black presents the first vinyl edition of Dickon Hinchliffe's original score for 1980 -- the second part of Channel 4 and Revolution Films' Red Riding trilogy, adapted by Tony Grisoni from David Peace's quartet of novels and first screened in 2009. Each film in the Red Riding trilogy, a landmark achievement in British television history, was helmed by a different director and had its own distinctive look, sound and feel. While Julian Jarrold's 1974 and Anand Tucker's 1983 were bo…
The car boot sales
A recent collaboration between these sound experimentalists consisting of both musicians’ passionate relation to found objects and recycled material treated as instruments. Devoted solo performers of free improvised music, also members of the London Improvisers Orchestra, Tasos Stamou (modified electronics, prepared zither, found violin) & Adam Bohman (amplified objects, prepared balalaika and prepared violin) create layers of “instant” musique concrète which balances between narrative structure…
Souvenir Of Italy
A lost gem from the mid 80s in the best italian tradition, BlowUp reissue of the month: to describe GustoForte’s Picture disc “Souvenir of Italy - La merda che fuma”, to give some dialect shape to the electro-magnetic throbbings that come out from the record , to try drawing, with grammatic help also that more basic, a logic or a descriptive way, it’s complex.And not because exists a multi-shape objective difficulty but rather the concreteness it’s impossible to approach to GustoForte: sandpaper…
Rare Tracks 1979 - 1982
Conrad Schnitzler is considered to be the keyfigure of electronic Avantgarde Music in Europe. Schnitzler was member of Tangerine Dream and Kluster and Con Many years ahead of his time, CON was revolutionary in many aspects, He predated Industrial Music, sounded like Kraftwerk and DAF before they did and makes music today at the age of 71. Some rare early works in re-edited versions by Mooner aka Zombie nation. The track ''Electroklang'' is featured as a loop only!! Amazing electronic music…
(B)Haunted
Following his collaborations with Fabio Orsi and Luigi Turra published in 2012-2013, it’s time for another Gianluca Becuzzi solo album on Silentes. This electronic / electro-acoustic composer and sound-artist boast an enviable curriculum: active since the first half of the ‘80s as founder of the historic Darkwave / Industrial project Limbo, since 1999 his artistic production is characterized by a strong experimental imprint and by a clear tendency toward abstract aesthetic forms and micro/macro …
Bish Bosch
Deluxe double LP pressed onto 180g vinyl, includes a copy of the album on CD free inside. Also includes a comprehensive 36 page booklet* It can't be easy following a record as beguiling as 2008's genre-defying 'The Drift', but pounding to life with the incessant woodpecker percussion of album opener 'See You Don't Bump His Head', it's clear that 69-year-old Scott Walker has shock and awe in mind. He's never been an artist who's struggled with originality, and 'Bish Bosch' takes his aural cubism …