New Arrivals
Song Islands Vol. 2
Song Islands Vol. 2, released under the Mount Eerie moniker as opposed to Microphones like the original Song Islands compilation, is a sizable compendium of songs covering from the 2002 release of Song Islands to the present day. Coming in at a total of 31 tracks, Song Islands Vol. 2 continues Phil Elverum’s powerful and decidedly exploratory musical style. The compilation maintains an incredible sense of intimacy, even when the vocals get choral, which is on the precipice of being the rule as o…
When The Rest Are Up At Four
Mind Over Mirrors is the solitary reeling of American harmoniumist/electronicist Jaime Fennelly. Utilizing an Indian pedal harmonium, oscillators, tape delays, and an assortment of synthesizing processors, Fennelly bends slowly-building, repetitive melodies into massive sonic mountains. When the Rest Are Up at Four is the fourth Mind Over Mirrors album following releases on Digitalis, Hands In the Dark, & Aguirre/Gift Tapes."Jaime Fennelly’s Mind Over Mirrors is the true dark star. The Chicag…
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 …
Ekin Fil
Operating out of Istanbul, Ekin Fil is the solo project of Turkish musician Ekin Üzeltüzenci. Her music first came to the ears of many by way of “Language,” a 2011 cassette release on the Root Strata label. “Language” presented listeners with a fractured, hazy soundworld in which half-remembered melodies and wraith-like vocals cohered into dark and hypnotic masses. On this self-titled album, Ekin opens the curtains a bit, letting in some light and offering up an even more refined album. This is …
Curse of the Bodysnatchers - Tape-Recordings 1980-86
Gerald O'Connell and Mark Harvey began recording as Mystery Plane in 1980, although they had worked together since 1978 in two other more conventional five-piece bands ( The End and 3D5). The very early stuff ( for instance Death Sentence contained on the bonus 7" for members) was recorded in Gerald's living room on a two-track Akai reel-to-reel with a primitive internal overdub facility. For the most part Mark wrote and sang the songs, while Gerald created the backing tracks. In 1981 they were …
s/t
Church was always a drag when I was a child. Dressed in Sunday best, I struggled to enact respect and silence throughout the entire mass. However, if church had sounded more like GA’AN, I would have been there any day of the week. Nothing in Peoria sounded like this. This is music to sacrifice virgins to. This is the soundtrack to Everyman’s epic Norse BDSM fantasy of destruction and rebirth. The scenarios conjured by these jams make the death of Sardanopolus look like kid stuff. Captcha Records…
On Onions
On Onions is a photographic study of onions by Israeli-born artist Elad Lassry (born 1977). Characteristically highlighting the spectrum of hues and shapes for the vegetable, Lassry’s selected taxonomy includes sections on red, yellow and white onions, each of which possesses its own distinct taste and benefits. On Onions is Lassry’s first artist’s book, and the work will exist only in book form; it is at once wry, refreshing and disorienting in its biology workbook style, which makes fru…
Frequencies
Nicolas Bernier’s Frequencies (Synthetic Variations) is his first piece made entirely of synthetic sounds. Having evolved within the musique concrète and field recording traditions, Bernier wanted to break with habit — the result being 15 short movements of warped and crackling textures, vividly articulated sine waves and rhythmic bursts of pattern. The piece is designed to be listened to at random (the sound sample above is such a sequence), offering a new duration and dynamics with every heari…
Five Poems for the Swamp Ghost
Recorded at Soopa studio and featuring Arthur Doyle (sax, flutes and voice), Jonathan Saldanha, Gustavo Costa and Filipe Silva (assorted percussions and electronics), this is a beautiful, wild, cut, with Doyle's touch being so deep, rough and gentle at the same time, while his band gives him plenty of room to spread out through minimal rythm patterns and a hypnotic work on bells and cymbals. Closing with an anthem that will give you shivers down your spine, this recording will bring you to an an…
Survivalist Tales!
Emil Amos, world renowned as drummer of the illustrious experimental rock groups Om and Grails, has an increasingly prolific, though relatively unknown, solo career under the moniker Holy Sons. Home recording over 1000 songs since the project's inception in 1992, Amos has spent the better part of the last two decades honing his song writing and production skills over a wide swath of genres in a mission to capture his internal world sonically. Only a handful of shows have ever been pla…
The miraculous mechanical monster
'The Miraculous Mechanical Monster is the latest addition to the ever growing and highly collectible 'Monster' series from Andrew Liles. The Miraculous Mechanical Monster is in part a concept LP that tells a tale of malfunctioning robots, monsters and bizarre sex. With robotic narration throughout, the story can be followed by reading the text on the back of the LP. As with all of Andrew Liles' output this LP fits into no established musical genre and is arguably one of his strangest and …
How To Get Out Of The Cage
From 1982 to 1992 Frank Scheffer worked with John Cage on many different occasions, which resulted in a unique archive of historical audio-visual material. Based on this unique archive, including interviews, musical performances and images of different locations related to his life and work—filmed on 16mm—the filmmaker Scheffer created How to Get Out of the Cage—A Year with John Cage. Frank Scheffer wrote: "The famous artist Marina Abramovic introduced me to John Cage. She thought it woul…
Protoplasm
Hand-stamped edition of 500 copies** Blackest Ever Black present recordings of Black Rain's riveting performance at Corsica Studios in October 2012. It's the first release by Stuart Argabright (Ike Yard/Death Comet Crew) since BEB compiled and reissued their seminal cyberpunk missive 'Now I'm Just A Number: Soundtracks 1994-95' on LP, and offers a murky glimpse of what to expect from the Black Rain album due in early 2014. There are few others who do this sound with such authenticity and …
Water mountain
On a personal note, I remember vividly when Hitoshi Kojo told me with excitement about a transhumance through UK with the specific purpose in mind of doing sessions with some of the great drone masters over there, namely : Colin Potter, Jonathan Coleclough and Paul Bradley...Retrospectively, I think I was as stirred as him.The resulting collected material has been shelved for years (7 actually !), and I began to fear this estimable musical heritage could get lost...this was not taking into accou…
Chimerizations
Chimerizations feature a radically new form of documentation of Florian Hecker’s sound works that dramatize the phenomenon of Auditory Chimaeras.
“Chimeras are integrated bodies that synthesize incompatible modalities, surpassing their respective particularities without fusing them, finding a common ground, or reducing one to the other.” (Robin Mackay)
The publication presents the documentation of Hecker’s recent sound pieces (“Magnitude Estimation,” 2010; “Hecker Leckey Sound Voice Chimera,” 20…
Disappearance
Pioneering electronic minimalist Taylor Deupree and revered Japanese composer Ryuichi Sakamoto collaborate properly for the first time with the willowy ambient beauty of 'Disappearance'. They previously crossed paths when Deupree remixed a song from Sakamoto's 'Chasm' album in 2006, and since then they've reached a mutual appreciation for the themes of 'Isolation, solitude, contemplation' which perfuse the delicate structures of 'Disappearance'. Its initial ideas were sketched out during rehears…
Crossarc chute
Crossarc Chute was inspired by my interest in the compositional strategies adopted for the early analogue electronics of the 1950s and ’60s, yet using digital processes and my own adaptations. Starting with pulse sounds, predefined filtering techniques and rules became the springboard from which I was able to generate many new sounds. These parameters formed a kind of system from which I could at times deviate.For one piece, Detail II, I separated the frequencybands of a group of sounds and then…
The New Dark Age of Love
The past two years have found Austin’s Lone State dark lord Xander Harris (aka Justin Sweatt) on a heavy transfigurative trip, overhauling his live rig, detouring through an expansive soundtrack project celebrating the 20th anniversary of Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash, touring outside Texas (from New Orleans to the Netherlands), plus a host of other inner life turmoils and metamorphoses. All of which seems to have seeped into the synthesizer soil of his stunning second full-length, The New Dark A…
I am the Center: private issue new age music in America, 1950-90
One of the best things about Seattle label Light in the Attic’s new new age compilation I Am the Center is that it doesn’t try and pretend that new age music was something that it’s not. Look at the album’s cover illustration and you’ll see an angel-like creature carrying an orb of yellow light through the clouds; open the gatefold and you’ll see what appears to be a bird made of stars launching itself out of the ocean. Press play and be delivered into over two hours of mind-numbingly mellow mus…
Purge
Kevin Drumm's 2007 cassette 'Purge' on iDEAL went out of stock in less than a week. This is the CD version of that killer thing. Intense listening taking you deep into the known unknown, or perhaps the unknown known. Drumm's noise is extremely powerful and dynamic.; travelling frequencies, rich with details, with very little hope, with guaranteed exhaustion after frequent listening. I always think about Black Metal when I am listening to Drumm's works,Ê they share the same cold and darkness. 'Pu…