New Arrivals
Galaxies
Laurence Vanay is the pseudonym for Jacqueline Thibault, wife of producer and musician Laurent Thibault (Magma). Her debut album "Galaxies" (1974) is pure genius: almost all instrumental, with gorgeous keyboards of many types, acoustic/electric guitar, even a little Zeuhl bass. There are wordless vocals on many of the tracks, although she occasionally sings in a soft, seductive manner. Incredible, spacey “avant-garde progressive chanson,” a Holy Grail for most collectors of 70's underground Fren…
Freermasonry
Lyrically Freermasonry consists of a series of poems and discourses. Early on in Freermasonry during 'SOL,' the Mother allusion is referenced out of Faust Part Two. It's a small portion and short moment. Faust does an invocation to the Mothers, but the execution is as trickery through occult charlatanism and not truly believed ritual. Goethe found passages about dark goddess figures known as Mothers in the writings of Plutarch. The metaphor is ambiguous, generally associated with creative dar…
Home Aged & The 18 Month Hope
The most recent installment of the rare & unheard archival recordings from the transgressive 70′s performance art group COUM Transmissions. Founded in late 1969 by Genesis P-Orridge, COUM Transmissions’s provocative performances mixed with visual art solidified the group as one of the most forward thinking breakthroughs within the 70′s conceptual art scene. Between 1969 and 1976, with a rotating membership including John Shapiro, Cosey Fanni Tutti, and Spydeee Gasmantell, COUM Transmissions …
Aural Spaces
I've been in touch with Ian MIDDLETON for over 13 years now, lured into contact by a remora lathe-cut lp, I believe, which sounded similar in intent to ifco material that karla and I were working on at the time. IanIan's music has always had both organic and artificial elements combined with the vague melancholy of distant beauty. With Aural spaces, Ian has refined and distilled his processes into a gorgeous electronic diamond. To quote my good friend oskar spee, 'Aural spaces is an exotic, scie…
Gills cut into woman
"Terrifying monster of the ages raging with pent-up passions! ...with every man his mortal enemy ...and a woman's beauty his prey! Could only her beauty tame its savage fury?""...forbidden depths!" Creature libertinage; voyeur of the women's legs enveloped in dark waters. The hosiery has been cast aside in exchange for a one-piece to enter the watery depths, setting the stage for obsessive creature tendencies targeted toward the shapes of Kay Lawrence, Helen Dobson, and Marcia Barton. Sam McKi…
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…
Kitchen
Kevin Drumm is a musician not only known as a one-man-orchestra exploring the boundaries of music, but also a star under the banner of inestimable Bocian Records label. This time we were granted with access to his kitchen. The LP is limited to 34 minutes, consisting of 2 pieces, originally recorded in 1996 yet fully remastered in 2012. Side one piece slowly opens a kitchen door. Smooth, equilibrious and loopy sound fractions that surpass those requirements ambient music is bound to meet. F…
Fever Logic
Ensemble Economique has emerged as an unusually globe-trotting creative valve for Arcata, CA, beachcomber Brian Pyle. The last year alone has seen him backpacking through Scandinavia, Europe and Russia—twice. Maybe his spirit’s too absorbent, ’cause he’s brought back some deeply heavier moods and ancient world weariness since his last outing on Not Not Fun, 2010’s demonic tribal monsoon Psychical. Recent splits with similarly instinctual psychedelic unclassifiables like Lee Noble and Her…
Live in Istambul
"Collective improvisation based on a Turkish folk tune. One of the most ecstatic piece of music i ever heard (simple as it is) ! suddenly i found myself dancing madly, like a Whirling Dervish... unfortunatly i didn't get Enlightment BUT, it was fun !" ep
Kogetsudai
Kogetsudai is Sylvain Chauveau's 10th album, the second in a trilogy initiated by Singular Forms (Sometimes Repeated) (2010), where the song structure is dismantled and reconstructed on the fringe of silence. Whereas Singular Forms found inspiration from Abstract Painting, Kogetsudai is influenced by Zen rock gardens found in Japan Ñ also the location where the album was conceived (for the most part) Ñ and from which the album borrows its title. Layers of minimal electronic sounds and filtered f…
Der Regt Mich Auf / A Controversy
Based around the married couple Paul and Limpe Fuchs, the group Anima, also known as Anima-Sound, was one of the most radically avant-garde and creative groups to emerge from the thriving Krautrock scene of Munich at the end of the 1960s. In fact, their improvised atonal sounds and unconventional instrumentation is much closer to the spirit of experimental free jazz than anything remotely close to rock music. The Fuchs began in the late '60s as part of the counterculture at the time. Adding to t…
Cuckoo live life like Cuckoo
Now in their tenth year the band have been gathering plaudits and accumulating new fans with every release, and after playing to thousands at Supersonic Festival last year, things are accelerating at an even faster pace. As with each album release, Hey Colossus continue to mutate and for their eighth album they have enlisted the support of a new drummer, Part Chimp guitar/vox man, Tim Cedar, who has undoubtedly brought a whole new kind of energy that has reinvigorated the band. When the rhythm s…
Excerpts (& Half-Speeds)
Dan Melchior is known by many as a long-standing footsoldier of garage rock. Throughout his 15 years of service Dan has gained a reputation as being one of the few in his field willing to test the flexibility of an otherwise stagnant genre. Last year's brilliant Assemblage Blues LP (Siltbreeze) showed Dan scratching at the bars of his cage, restricted by the very domain he dominates. Excerpts (& Half-Speeds) is Dan Melchior's hammer in the mirror. A courageous act of self-vandalism, reduc…
Wooden Veil
This Berlin-based group combining the talents of artists Marcel Türkowsky, Hanayo, Christopher Kline, Domink Noé and Jan Pfeiffer, who each seem to spread themselves between a number of different projects. Interestingly, Noé is credited as a member of "krautrock legends Lustfaust", which is the fictional band created by conceptual artist Jamie Sholvin for the 2006 Beck's Futures exhibition, which might prompt you to think that Wooden Veil re made up too. There's definitely some sort o…
Resorts & Ruins
In “Resorts & Ruinsâ€Â, a set of three recent sound works, Kyriakides deals with several themes in both a physical and narrative sense. All the pieces use source material that highlight specific vocal traditions, namely Turkish pop music, Cypriot epic song, and Baroque opera, but they also all make extensive use of other forms of speech and vocal acts. In “Varosha (Disco Debris)â€Â, a narrating voice is our tour-guide in the ruins of the Cypriot ghost town Varosha; the many fragm…
Hai kein Wal
Meeting between visual artist Beni Bischof and electronic musician Norbert Möslang. Limited to 200 copies and hand signed by artists. With this somewhat confused, absurd or primitive Bishop chant, the result could be to remembered as a crashing jumbo jet
Alien, All Too Alien
Their cat may well be all too alien but there's quite an earthly feel to this epic voyage of a record from the brothers Maurizio and Roberto Opalio. It feels like you are slowly drifting through different continents perched on a floating glass-domed steel barge, observing the strangely contrasting cultures go about their business, seemingly unaware they are being watched. Though there are certain sounds contained herein that are quite familiar to many 21st century homosapie…
Opiate Sun
The EP might be the ideal format for Justin Broadrick's music, regardless of his alias. Whether he's trying to erase your head via concrete-slab guitars in Napalm Death, reduce techno to a series of clockwork hammerblows with Final, or massage your pleasure centers with neo-shoegaze in Godflesh, Broadrick's music has a laudable singularity. The three-or-four-song dose mainlines his all-consuming mood of the moment without the potential dilution of trying to fill up a CD. Broadrick claims to be …
Lonely women's club
Beautiful new work from Lawrence English. Pressed in an edition of 500 copies. Somewhere after dark, before dawn, in a place where natural light is shunned and organ is singing. It's voice is that of an arcing clouds of tone, emerging and falling with an uneasy sense of pace and direction. The voice warbles, a vibrato of shifting pulse and subtle variation. The room around it is filled with a dusty ash; smoke in haze like proportions. Eyes are blood shot, sunken below the rim of a glass. …
The Acrylic Widow
Awesome! Quoting Metamkine review "Dylan Nyoukis returns assemblying iconoclastic voices, collages of field recordings, reminding a Tibetan monk lost in a festival of sound poetry or the music concrete by Michel Chion". Four measured tracks, all washing up a new kind of psychedelic moss, fresh thin tendrils, easy to snap, but determined to grow among loose grey matter late on into the next day, and the next and the next. Dry coughs and outta-whack piano chords play into Boy Scout bike repairs. …