New Arrivals
Stupor Hiatus
Definitive collection of Ohio lo-fi pioneer's 1974-1992 material. A mash of home-recorded punk, pop & psychedelia. "Man, i hate it when someone's entire career seems to have passed me by, especially when it's someone as crazy as lo-fi pioneer and mad ranty man Mike Rep. I know fuck all about this guy but he sounds like a genius. I guess he may have come to prominence for his production work with Guided By Voices, Strapping Fieldhands and Times New Viking but this guys been kicking it since …
Grain
CD edition "The new Zs lineup (Sam Hillmer, Greg Fox and Patrick Higgins) sounds very much like a new band, at least as evidenced by the Grain EP. The two side-length tracks (coming in at a total of 42-minutes) bear the marks of Zs' sound - repeated phrases, looped or played in situ; buried drones and harsh electronic tones - but it does sound very much like a new band.
There's an extended ambience to the album that trick perceptions of time. Glitches and waves that last only a minute or th…
Doomsdayer Holiday
Following up last year's Burning Off Impurities and their recent Take Refuge In Clean Living EP, Grails return with their darkest, heaviest record yet. Written and recorded over the last 18 months,Doomsdayer's Holiday delivers on the promises made by their previous albums, taking equal pride in smoky psychedelics and mountain-ascending riffs. With Faust, Earth and Sunn O))) collaborators acting as engineers - not to mention drummer Emil Amos having recently become the new other half of Om - Grai…
Zwischen
Karen Geyer is a sound artist who is active between Zurich and New York. ZWISCHEN is her second release. Under the name “Grauton” (“shade of grey”) she invents and builds her own mechanical objects whose sounds she picks up using contact microphones; she then amplifies and steers these sounds via a mixing desk as if they were the instruments of an orchestra. The instruments here comprise common or garden items removed from their everyday duties, such as bicycles, fans, kettles, stools and …
Alcor
restocked!! Alcor is the debut LP by a new voice from the Australian wilderness. Hailing from Ferntree Gully, Victoria, the music of Astor has thus far been appreciated only via a string of barely-distributed CDRs. Alcor gathers together the prime of these micro-editions and presents the material as a seductive and puzzling new whole. Field recordings of humble organic activity bend against a foundation of discreetly processed electronics/piano, creating sonorities that are as undefinable a…
Sunrise
The music of My Education, a five-piece group from Austin, Texas, tends towards the classical side of the spectrum. If you’ve read any recent think-piece about how the lines between rock bands and classical ensembles are blurring, you could pretty easily swap their name into the list of case studies provided without sacrificing accuracy. Besides recording their own compositions, they’ve also released their take on Arvo Pärt’s taut “Spiegel im Spiegel” and collaborated with the hip-hop group däle…
Nepenthe
Julianna Barwick returns with the successor to 2011's charming The Magic Place. Given how successful that self-recorded LP was, it’s surprising to see that the Louisiana-born singer has looked to an external producer to document and frame her work this time around, namely Sigur Ros associate Alex Somers. Barwick once again uses delay-pedals to build heaven-scraping towers of chorused plainsong out of her earnestly, achingly pretty soprano, placing them in what John Foxx - whose 90s’ ambient reco…
Active recovering music
Active Recovering Music (ARM) is a slide whistle ensemble led by sax player Masahiko Okura. All of the members play the slide whistle. Okura debuted ARM in concert with a five-member formation in 2008. He's since continued the group's activity (though their live performances are infrequent) with changing numbers of players. This is the recording of a performance by ARM--this time with eight members--which took place at Ftarri, Tokyo, in February 2013. Each of the three pieces was composed by Oku…
No Visible Means
Originally self-released in 1984 on Pterodactyl Records, No Visible Means is the work of Canada's own Lou Champagne. Lou Champagne was active the Ontario music scene and also performed with other local musicians from that region as well. The Lou Champagne System was the real-time guitar synth solo act of Lou Champagne. Due to his knowledge of electronics, he was able to link his guitar, synth, and synthetic drums into a working one-man solo act that was playable with floor switches and …
Interface
Awesome, monolithic slab of metal machine music from 1977, France, Paris...Heldon! A prog/early electronic holy grail replete with breathtaking and far-out Heldon's most crystalline work, building to the epic crescendo of the title track. Many fans consider this to be their masterpiece, but more importantly, Interface is a record that will continue to unfold for centuries to come. Richard Pinhas is an artistic iconoclast. A French intellectual as likely to collaborate with MAGMA as the radica…
Live at Cbgb 1986
“Not since the early days of MC5 at the Grande Ballroom in Detroit, circa 1968, had there been such an organic melding of sheer metalesque maelstrom and free jazz. These archival recordings from the legendary punk club CBGB capture a moment in time when open-minded musicians from the 'downtown scene' were exploring the possibility of bringing Lou Reed's feedback-infested Metal Machine Music together with Albert Ayler's Love Cry. Dissipated Face guitarist Kurt "Hologram" Ralske and special guest …
My Love Is Higher Than Your Assessment
...of What My Love Could Be" EXCLUSIVE!! 2LP vinyl. This is ground zero for one of the 90s last true cult bands; now legendary for churning ghostly wailings, unearthly bellows, & gentle whispers together into one soaring, crawling, ugly & beautiful blend of brilliance. An essential listening for all fans of hard & heavy post-rock. Comes w/ 12x12 insert. Don't sleep on this!
Music Of Group Ongaku
"Group ONGAKU, founded mainly by students at Tokyo National University of Fine Art & Music, was the 1st collective musical improvisation group. The group began their activities in 1958, & from the naming of the group in 1960 onward continued until somewhere around 1962. They attempted to create acoustics corresponding to actual time & space by means of collective improvisation. Although methodically different, the music that they pursued incidentally shared common directions with contemporaries …
Rajasthan Street Music
"Swathed in hundreds of miles of snaking hinterland, the northwestern Indian state of Rajasthan is a giant canvas for the imagination of the wanderers it gives home to. Through the stark reaches of the vast Thar Desert, Rajasthan shares borders as well as bloodlines with the Pakistani provinces of Sindh and Punjab to the west and the Indian state of Gujarat to the south. The state's rough history and harsh environment is heavily reflected in the Rajasthani people and Marwari tribal culture; cent…
Ivan
Feeding Tube is chuffed to present the first vinyl offering from Moscow's berserk Asian Women On The Telephone. Formed as a duo in 2007, they have since expanded (in all directions) to assume sextet form, with stage names worthy of Smegma -- Oriental Yid (drums, guitar), Good Enough Freundin (guitar, vocal, drums), Brown Polizei (keyboards, voice, bass), Divine Gift (percussion, voice), Mutter Land (drums, percussion, bass), and Lewd Primat (bass, voice). Many of their insane, extremely theatric…
White Metal
“White Metal” is a new piece by Michael Pisaro, realised by the composer and Miguel Prado. “When I first heard that Michael was thinking of working on a project with the name “White Metal”, I contacted him, excited to know more about it. At first we talked about general aspects of the piece, without knowing the route it would take, beyond a couple of conceptual premises. At some point, Michael suggested that this project be included in his “Grey Series” a series of noise-oriented scores he was …
We Will Always Be
There's a disarming honesty to the way Michigan-based husband and wife duo Windy & Carl communicate with one another. A blog post from Windy, published in late 2011, describes the making of We Will Always Be, framing it in the context of their relationship. "Yeah, we have had bumps in the road, and on occasion it seems as if we may never recover from these bumps, but we do," she wrote. That type of candor doesn't stop at the written word; it also bleeds through into the duo's music. Often their …
Aoyama Crows
Aoyama Crows is the fifth album by Peter Brötzmann's Die Like a Dog Quartet. Saying the music can still surprise would be a lie. But that doesn't mean it lacks excitement, on the contrary. The performance, recorded at the Berlin Total Music Meeting in November 1999, contains all the elements necessary for an enticing free improv session. The rhythm section formed by Hamid Drake and William Parker is tried, tested, and true. The drummer can oscillate in and out of a pulse with incredible ease. He…
Coin coin chapter two: Mississippi Moonchile
2013 release. Mississippi Moonchile is the much-anticipated new installment of Matana Roberts' unique and forward-looking project and it finds Roberts conjuring some of the most nuanced, thoughtful and substantial American liberation music of the 21st century. Mississippi Moonchile was developed for an intimately woven New York jazz sextet and represents the next leap forward in Roberts' iconoclastic and complex project of memory and recuperation, where historical and contemporary musical tropes…
Mad Curry
Founded in Belgium in 1970 with a remarkable line-up for a rock band: sax, organ, bass, drums and vocals - no guitar!, Mad Curry caught the attention of manager & enterpreneur Louis de Vries (the man who had arranged the very first Pink Floyd gig in Belgium) and soon debuted with the "Song for Cathreen" / "Antwerp" 45. "Antwerp" has become a club favourite ever since due to its danceable freakbeat psych rhythm. Shortly after, the Mad Curry album was released on the Pirate label, characterized by…