New Arrivals
The Parasites Of The Western World
The Parasites of the Western World are a band from Portland, OR who released their recorded debut in 1978. It's a fascinating spin, a galactic ramble across the otherworldly themes of alienation and paranoia, seemingly inspired by LSD and Philip Dick. Primarily the creation of Patrick Burke and Terry Censky, the Parasites were limitless with invention and completely DIY. This is a record that was recorded in an apartment, by a crew thoughtful enough to curtail it's loud excursions for the…
Regine Flory
Limited to 200. Zak Boerger's combination of fuzz, acoustic guitar & extended downer ballads most immediately aligns him with the New Zealand scene centered around Peter Jefferies & Alastair Galbraith as well as associated international satellites like Flying Saucer Attack & the Twisted Village roster, but there's a lonesome edge to the music that would situate it ouside of any particular historical tradition & closer to the mystery school of regional private press obscurities. The acoustic trac…
Barbecue Bob in Fishtown
Guitarist /composer Glenn Jones claims a lengthy and rich relationship to what his longtime friend John Fahey so famously dubbed "American Primitive Guitar". Aside from being seduced by punk in its latter-70's heyday and brandishing the electric for a large portion of his career (including 20 years as a founding member of post-rock instrumentalists Cul de Sac), it was the acoustic steel-string and the seemingly multi-directional genres born from Fahey's homespun Takoma imprint that informed much…
Copenhagen Dreams
Copenhagen Dreams is director Max Kestner’s documentary film portrait of Denmark’s capital. It’s a film about the physical surroundings that are part of shaping our lives. About the buildings we wake up in, the front doors we walk out of, the streets we traverse. It is also a film about how the way we live our lives affects our physical surroundings. About the places we dream of and the walls onto which we scratch the names of our loved ones, before it’s too late.It focuses on the city as a phys…
Live At The Accident!
"Crazy 3-way collaboration from some of America's best underground musicians. Charalambides' Tom Carter is joined by Shawn McMillen, sometime member of Warmer Milks and Ash Castles On The Ghost Coast, with the added power of Starving Weirdos. This two track collaboration has been around since 2007 and it landed in my mailbox a few months back, and man, it's a real beauty. Side A is a total hypnotic slice of ravaged drone, the four musicians seamlessly blend their own styles of underground bliss …
Henzai
Tokyo-based guitarist/singer Hisato Higuchi presents his fourth full-length and first LP release. Henzai is Higuchi at his most bare. Each song appears like a spectral poem -- sewn together with hushed electricity and whispers. This recording is wholly intimate, recorded in seclusion, and washes over the listener like a hazy, day-break dream. Higuchi splits these 12 torch-songs between slow-motion improvisations and the composed, yet each is sung with a mix of beautiful wordless/Japanese languag…
Rainmaker
The day has come! We’re kicking off 2012 with a deluxe reissue of Michael Chapman’s debut Rainmaker. Originally released on Harvest Records in 1969, Rainmaker is a psychedelic-guitar-folk delight. Featuring some of Chapman’s best loved songs, “It Didn’t Work Out,” which features a stellar cast of legendary English musicians of the era; Guitarist “Clem” Clempson was in the prog-band Bakerloo (soon after playing with Chapman he’d join jazz-rockers Colosseum and then Humble Pie) Drummer Aynsley Dun…
Triangles
There's something almost religious about this Charlatan (Brad Rose) LP, its narrative arc swinging from light to dark and back again. From the opening chords of "Lime Beauty," we're awash in polarized-lens glinting twilight, fluorescent skies over the water. "Trace Blue Outlines" is trance-like and reflective, with long, arpeggiated figures chasing each other skyward in a fugue. Darkness creeps in around the edges of "Vodka Rocks," with almost post-rock moodiness bringing the side to a cl…
Night of Purple Moon
Sun Ra was a innovative jazz composer, pianist, synthesizer player, poet and philosophiser who was fascinated by cosmic philosophy. Ra’s fascination with all things ‘cosmic’ combined with his instrumental ability lead to the creation of off-kilter, avant-garde and highly experimental music. ‘The Night of the Purple Moon’ originally cut in 1970 showcases Sun Ra playing the Roksichord (a then state-of-the-art solid-state electronic keyboard manufac…
Slime Code
Fractured bleep techno and de-composed electronics for followers of Container, Keith Fullerton Whitman, Konono No.1, Ekoplekz, Harmonious Thelonious - Edition of 500, initial copies on olive green wax* Following a pair of strong LPs for Dekorder, Dan Hayhurst (audio) and Reuben Sutherland (visuals) released 'Slime Code' on cassette for Patten's Kaleidoscope label last year - and it's a peach. The music was performed live to 8-track tape from which a digital edit was compiled and from that…
Nova
"Soul Jazz Records are re-releasing this classic release of deep spiritual jazz by Steve Reid and The Master Brotherhood, entitled Nova available for the first-time at mid-price. There is also a one-off limited-edition vinyl repress of 1000 copies worldwide. Steve Reid is now known worldwide for his radical collaborations with Kieren Hebden on Domino Records. Nova (and Rhythmatism, also re-released) are his amazing first albums recorded in the early 1970s -- all now serious collector's al…
Fugue
I began writing about this Tape & Bill Wells 'Fugue' record yesterday but I gave up as the words just were not coming to me. I guess that's probably a good sign though as I was just kind of getting into the melancholy zone of the record, which certainly is a thing of beauty. Wells' guitar playing is delicate and magical. The Tape guys really give him space to do his thing adding wonderful little details and twinkles into the mix. This quite simply is the prettiest, most charming record I …
And In The Endless Pause There Came The Sound Of Bees
A flop-eared rodent frolics in a lush field. In from the horizon sweeps a black cloud, kicked up by an army of similar-looking rodents. That's the basic set-up of Varmints, a 24-minute film by Studio AKA animator Marc Craste, based on a book written by Helen Ward and illustrated by Craste. Jóhann Jóhannsson draws the title of his latest album from the book, and this is the music he composed for the film's soundtrack. There's quite a bit of extra material-- the album is a full 1…
Akashic Record (Events: 1986-1990)
Outer Space is a rapidly evolving sound entity headed by John Elliott and joined by a constantly rotating cast of midwestern U.S. electronic figures. Akashic Record sees the project grow in many different directions from the self-titled Arbor album created throughout 2008 and 2009 while retaining similar aesthetics of synthesizer experimentation and it's esoteric relations. Recorded over the course of a year with close engineering assistance and compositional contributions from Andrew Ver…
Hustler Power Electronics Convention
You must live in tokyo to be able to follow the immense output of the soundburrier that is Masaya Nakahara, aka Violent Onsen Geisha, most of his work doesn't make it out of Satou Dan's Tatsunoya bar in Shinjuku, not because no one wants it, just because the tokyo noise scene seems to gather there late at night to forefil their pork anus - chicken paw needs, and Nakahara's last 40 cdr's were the ideal soundtracks for this ritual. the old skool dead pan electronics, plunderphonics, parodies, nois…
Electronics Without Tears
LP eition: the excellent Public Information label really comes into its own with this revelatory collection of early concréte tape music by F.C. Judd - a much overlooked British electronic music pioneer and contemporary of Daphne Oram. Born in Woodford, East London in 1914, Frederick Charles Judd served in the RAF coastal command during WWII working with highly secret radar equipment. After being demobbed he applied this knowledge and skilled engineering background to his musical interests…
The Cry!
Exact repro, originally released in 1962, a spiritual jazz masterpiece. "In the early '60s, flutist Prince Lasha's work with alto saxophonist Sonny Simmons was often compared to the trailblazing free jazz that Ornette Coleman was exploring at the time....Free jazz performances like 'Bojangles,' 'A.Y.,' and the rhythmic 'Congo Call' are abstract, cerebral, and left-of-center, but they're still a bit more accessible than Coleman's harmolodic experimentation.
Cosmos
One of the best-remembered Sun Ra albums from the 70s – a really cool little session that features Ra playing the unusual "rocksichord" all the way through! The instrument's a very weird one – kind of like a messed-up electric piano, with lots of cool broken notes and a weird fuzzed-out tone – one that almost feels like a guitar's being fitted into a keyboard, with almost psychedelic results! Ra's use of the rocksichord gives the album a really eerie, outer spacey sound – one that mixes strongly…
Pachyderm
Revered, veteran guitar maverick, Michael Chapman of Cumbria, England, presents the hushed, radiant 24-minute improvisation 'Pachyderm', alongside an electronically tempered remix by Robert Antony. It's the 2nd in his more recent series of improvisations, making a move away from the structured songwriting much loved by the likes of John Peel, Thurston Moore and Jack Rose, to an absorbingly patient, simple and meditative style exploring the potential of a single ambient chord. Robert Anton…
Soulnessless EP 2 (DJ Sprinkles Remix)
The 2nd of two keenly awaited vinyl EPs supporting the ambitious 32 hour, 16GB microSD card release of Terre Thaemlitz's 'Soulnessless' - this time featuring a killer reworking from Terre's DJ Sprinkles Alias, plus a sublime 18 minute Piano excerpt of the original. With 'Meditation on Wage Labor and the Death of the Album (Sprinkles' Unpaid Overtime)' on the A-side Terre returns to the deeply arresting New York/New Jersey minimalist House approach which made his 2009 LP - 'Midtown 120 Blue…