New Arrivals
The Further The Flame, The Worse It Burns Me Greek Folk Music
Early 20th century recordings from the great Greek singer Marika Papagika – recordings made for Columbia Records in NYC between 1919 and 1929! Beautiful material that quite easily could have gone lost to the world over the long, long years – very few photos of Marika are even known to exist! The sound is still wonderful, and it's put together in a great vinyl release by Mississippi! It comes with a lovely folder of notes, a bit of a nod to classic Folkways releases. Titles include "H…
Live At Skymall
Jan Jelinek, Hanno Leichtmann and Andrew Pekler have formed a trio that can truly be called a supergroup. As solo artists, all three members are among the most renowned of Berlin's electronic musicians. When playing together as Groupshow, the three instrumentalists -- themselves largely informed by minimalist sensibilities -- engage with the idiom of free-form collective improvisation, which has a long tradition in Germany dating back to the days of Fluxus and Krautrock. Consequentially, t…
El Pianista del Antifaz
French-Catalan musician Pascal Comelade's world is atypical and his inspirations come from many different sources -- from contemporary music to The Cramps -- making him one of the most creative and original artists of our times. At the crossroads of many different arts, never where he's expected, he never ceases to surprise his audience, taking the listener on poetic paths of primitive perception. El Pianista del Antifaz is the latest album in Comelade's galaxy. The artwork was designed by Du…
Kilo
Finnish experimental electronic musician Mika Vainio's first solo album for Blast First sees him return to his classic power electronics/heavy beats approach that made Pan Sonic garner a worldwide reputation. The album developed from Vainio's recent live sets to make 10 tersely-titled tracks inspired by the shipping container industry. Four stars in Mojo: "heavy-freight," The Quietus describes it as "fearsome."
Gridshifter
Stefan Nemeth: synthesizers. Steven Hess: drums (on B-Side). Bernhard Breuer: drums (on 'Dedispersion I & II'). Innode enters the world with an audacious debut of rhythm and sound, space and silence and an astonishing blend of the acoustic and the electronic. Spearheaded by Stefan Németh (cofounder of Radian, Lokai) in close collaboration with Steven Hess (Locrian, Pan American, Cleared) and Bernhard Breuer (Elektro Guzzi, Tumido), Gridshifter is an intense, astonishing sonic experience which na…
Summer through my mind
Richard Youngs presents his debut recording for BaDaBing Records, and the label is looking forward to a long relationship. For Summer Through My Mind, Youngs pushes himself into a challenging new sphere yet again. A renowned musician with over 40 albums to his name, he goes somewhere he never has before - to the heart of American music. Summer Through My Mind is a country music album, warped through Youngs's ambidextral mind. A warning: it's not like any country album one has heard before. There…
No Answer : Lower Floors
LP version. "No Answer : Lower Floors is the record of 2013 you need to be most worried about. No Answer : Lower Floors is further flesh to the shadowy silhouette cast by this Michigan art abstraction unit, perenially poised on the cusp of a precipice. Wolf Eyes will carry on forever but always remain mysteriously unfinished. The No Answer : Lower Floors material covers all bases: tough to toughest to tangled, all done in the Wolves' least convoluted smooth style. The vocals, delays, primit…
Berlin
Ernesto Rodrigues, viola. Chris Heenan, alto saxophone, contrabass clarinet. Alexander Frangenheim, double bass. Ofer Bymel, percussion. Recorded 2010 in Berlin.
Sounding the Body Electric
The connections between the visual arts and experimental music were closer in the 1960s and 1970s than perhaps any time before or since. Sound and image combined in artists films, \'happenings\' and sounding installations. Experimental Forms of notation were also created to stimulate uninhibited musical expression. Eastern European artists and composers were at the forefront of these new experiments with sound and yet their achievements have never been recorded until now. Sounding the Body…
Convulsive Threshold
Two heavyweight explorers of sound and technology, Russell Haswell and Yasunao Tone, both undertaking separate rigorous experiments into the synthesis of sound and all its remits, converge for one helluva collaborative work. ‘Convulsive Threshold’ is the result of years of research and experimentation, Haswell’s systems of hybrid analogue/digital audio generation acting as one of the starting points for this relentess piece of material, which are then subjected to Tone’s MP3 Deviation tec…
Gagged In Boonesville
French globe-tourist High Wolf has hand-rolled his way up Mount Fuji, trainspotted every corner of Europe, hitch-hiked across America and Australia, chugged Ganges water, and crouched on all manner of smoke-stained prayer rug since first looping a bongo back in ’09. His apprenticeship in the House of Wah nearly complete, he’s hinted at a potentially seismic shift in the High Wolf third eye doctrine lurking in the near future; perhaps his Away Team exfoliation moment is nigh. Fortunately, …
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…
Piano Music
Two compositions exploring the decay of the piano from Wandelweiser composer Eva-Maria Houben. Fading sound is the link between life and art; between perception in daily life and perception while performing, while composing.“Fading sound is the link between life and art; between perception in daily life and perception while performing, while composing. And the awareness of fading sound may become the awareness of presence.” Halfway through Eva-Maria Houben’s abgemalt, the pianist unfurls a …
Cover Versions
Andrew Pekler selected 300 different covers from second-hand records and, using colorful geometric elements to cover over all titles, performer’s names, and label logos, removed traces of the covers’ original contexts. The sunsets, couples in silhouette, alpine panoramas, roses on pianos, female faces in close-up, and seascapes no longer serve as the packaging for easy listening and exotica. Instead, the romantic, bizarre and intriguingly bland images of the original covers are free to lend thei…
United States of America Triptych (I)
Voice by Pete Simonelli, guitar by Miron Grzegorkiewicz, bass Guitar by Michael‚ Biela, turntable by DJ Lenar. Text excerpted from 1939 Southern Recording Trip Fieldnotes by John Lomax and Ruby LomaxAudio quotes excerpted from their recordings.
Novaya Zemlya
Novaya Zemlya (lit. "New Land"), also known in Dutch as "Nova Zembla" and in Norwegian as "Gåselandet" (lit. the "Goose Land"), is an archipelago in the Arctic Ocean in the north of Russia and the extreme northeast of Europe, the easternmost point of Europe, lying at Cape Flissingsky on the northern island. The artwork, by Jon Wozencroft, includes an essay by Thierry Charollais, "Thomas Köner's Novaya Zemlya: towards a metaphysical geography"... Of course we find the unique Köneresque glow…
Zack Gluck
Effortlessly fusing krautrock with jazz and ethnic music, Embryo were unparalleled in the world of progressive fusion and 1984's Zack Glück is one of their most ambitious and rewarding LPs. Flutes and saxophones mix with oud, marimba and violin to make an intoxication concoction. Originally released on Italian's Sonori label, Mirumir is pleased to present the very first official vinyl reissue of this prog classic.
Sous Juju
A collection of darkly shining northern diamonds, Sous juju is a two-CD compilation of the musical work of Kuupuu from her first releases in 2003 up to previously unreleased material from 2012. Kuupuu, known by her parents as Jonna Karanka, is a self-taught musician and visual artist from Finland who inhabits a semi-magical world where the mundane and the mysterious meet and make wonderful music together. Using tapes and loops, instruments both traditional and modern, Kuupuu's blend of low-tech …
A Red Score In Tile
Composed way back in 1979, 'A Red Score In Tile' eventually surfaced as a vinyl-only edition in 2003. Made up of piano, this shows Basinski's patented tape-loop technique perfectly and still stands as one of his most affecting pieces of music. If you've heard 'Melancholia' you'll likely know what I'm talking about, piano notes are transformed into tones by the slowly disintegrating tape, and the loops become motifs all of their own. The beauty of Basinski's work is in its patience, and this earl…
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…