New Arrivals
Processes & potentials
So much music claims to capture the moment. But as Processes & Potentials proves, in-the-momentness can be a malleable concept. The result of three years of studio work, the album sees Bjarni Gunnarsson following his longstanding interest in exploring liquid states, transformational activities and the complex relationships between cause and effect. It is music which behaves differently, unexpectedly, veering off into surprising directions and never staying in one place for too long Ð it is certa…
These Are The Good Times
The Vittelli label announces itself with this fine release of London’s highlife, lowlife, wildlife and everday life plucked from Ian Rawes’ vast London Sound Survey. At his day job at the British Library sound archive Rawes cut his teeth in archiving and explored its depths. Field recordings and studies by acoustic ecologists came to his attention around the same time that he was looking to create his own capital-based project. At this time the internet promised to be the great equaliser a…
Mirror Mirror
A collector's dream come true, Sam Sander's Mirror Mirror is so rare that the recordings on this album have never before seen a proper release and even the cover art had to be created from scratch. An almost unbelievable fact given that it ranks as one of the strongest releases in the already air-tight era of Strata Inc's Detroit. Although he's been compared to John Coltrane, Ornette Coleman, and Joe Henderson, Sam Sanders stands out as one of the most unique phenomena to come from the Motor Cit…
Live At Sant'Anna Arresi Jazz Festival
Saturn calls, Istanbul responds! After releasing a handful of beautiful releases last year that brought them to the attention of the free jazz scene, Konstrukt come back with a fantastic album recorded in collaboration with Mr. Marshall Allen, the legendary saxophonist of the Sun Ra Arkestra (aka the best band ever landed on Earth). Cosmic, cathartic, spiritual free jazz in its purest form! When music can make you travel with your imagination like this, building bridges between different…
NYC, Hell 3:00 AM
James Ferraro takes inspiration from "the things I see" in his 'NYC, Hell 3:AM' dystopia. The follow-up to 'Sushi' is a wry reflection of his locale, "a surreal psychological sculpture of American decay and confusion" evoking imagery of "rats, metal landscape, toxic water, junkie friends, HIV billboards, evil news, luxury and unbound wealth, exclusivity, facelifts, romance, insane police presence and lonely people... all against the sinister vastness of Manhattan's alienating skyline." Of course…
Strange Passion
Mindblowing comp of obscure, highest-calibre DIY Post-Punk and Synthwave from the archives, brilliantly compiled by Darren McCreesh and brought to you by Finders Keepers' Cache Cache sublabel - so damn good. There's been a deluge of post-punk reissues and rarity compilations in the past five years, and in turning their spades to the same ground, Finders Keepers have dug way deeper than anybody else, and come up with a cache lost classics that are both truly lost and truly classic - the quality c…
A finger in the fishes mouth - Poetry book
A facsimile edition of Derek Jarman’s only poetry collection, A Finger in the Fishes Mouth, originally published by Bettiscombe Press, Bridport, Dorset in 1972, is due to be published by Test Centre, with a new Foreword by Sophie Mayer and Afterwords by Keith Collins, Jarman’s partner, and Tony Peake, his biographer.Postcards from Jarman’s own collection, here gorgeously reproduced in an evocative green, preface each of the 32 numbered poems, written when he was in his early twenties. The impact…
A history of every one
'A History of Every One' by Bill Orcutt is an album of songs: minstrel songs, holiday songs, hymns, marches, cowboy songs, Disney songs, work songs, delta blues. The original tunes themselves are nothing special, well known, but not particularly well-regarded. Most would be filler on a mid-60's Doris Day or Burl Ives LP. What Orcutt does with them however is remarkable: expanding upon techniques developed on 2011's 'How the Thing Sings' and incorporating ideasforged since his recording of 'The S…
Peepers
Elsewhere, ‘The Love Didn't Go Anywhere’ sees Leafcutter John play guitar on a beautifully loping piece that has the subtle afterglow of classic Roxy Music, with Bryan Ferry’s vocal replaced by the rapier glide of the two reeds, while Tom Herbert’s hefty double bass pounds out concise but penetrating lines. Interestingly, prior to the sessions, Rochford listened to a lot of ‘60s soul (“Aretha and Marvin Gaye”), an influence that he has channelled with more guile than is immediately discernible. …
Introjection
The collaboration between Israeli electronic musician Shay Nassi and German media artist Nicolas Wiese began in 2008, with the exchange of some raw recordings of feedbacks and everyday objects, via internet. During the following years, several compositional sketches have been sent back and forth and so have been refined step by step, in multiple sonic layering and construction processes. The result is a 45-minute-long collection of dense, dynamic, ambiguos and twisted atmospheric pieces which ca…
Drawn and Quartered
"A selection of rarities from 2008-2009. Track one originally released on an OPN/Outer Space split CS (Arbor, 2009). Track two originally released on Ruined Lives CS (Young Tapes, 2008). Track three and four originally released on Transmat Memories CS (Taped Sounds 2008). Track five and six originally released on A Pact Between Strangers CDR (Gneiss Things, 2008). Track seven originally released on Young Beidnahga CDR (Ruralfuane, 2009)." Includes a digital download code.
Graft
Graft is an album by Japanese noise master Masami Akita aka Merzbow. This LP album is pressed on lime-green vinyl in a "bootleg"-style sleeve and sealed with a sticker. Limited to 300 regular copies. According to the Merzbow blog, the design was inspired by a '70s Jethro Tull bootleg called My God, and the recording was inspired by the plant illustrations in the Voynich manuscript. Recorded in November 2009 at Munemi House, Tokyo.
Scott 2
2013 repress. "Originally released in 1968, Scott 2 made it all the way to number one on the UK pop charts, perhaps the strangest number one hit in pop history. Continuing with his orchestral obsession, Scott 2 features over-the-top string and horn arrangements, occasionally veering into dangerously schmaltzy territory. This production style is in drastic contrast to the lyrical content, songs of despair, prostitution, homosexuality, and brutal honesty, indicting the same glamorous and gli…
Mountains Of Tongues
Important collection of recordings documenting and preserving "fringe" or under-represented folk cultures and voices from a unique region at the crossroads of Europe and Asia. It spans a diverse cross-section of music by Armenians, Azerbaijanis, Georgians, Chechens and many other ethnicities which fall outside their country's definition of national folk music - Azeris from Georgia, Kurds from Tbilisi, Avars and Lezgis from Azerbaijan, or Molokans in the South Caucasus - giving room for al…
Time Banking
Korm Plastics is proud to present the twenty-fourth release in the Brombron series (missing numbers will follow later this year). Originally a co-production between Staalplaat and Extrapool, it is now hosted by co-curator Frans de Waard. In the year 2000 Frans de Waard and Extrapool started the Brombron project. Two or more musicians become artists in residence in Extrapool, an arts initiative in Nijmegen, The Netherlands, with a fully equipped sound recording studio. These artists can work in a…
Weird universe
Valerie Martino's Unicorn Hard-On project has been a long running staple in the American underground since it's inception in 2003. Through her own Tangled Hares imprint, as well as many others, she's built a strong, constantly evolving catalog of singular works that serves to many as a prototype of the current beat-oriented phenomena currently sweeping the nation. Martino's vision, however,remains unphased and flourishes accordingly to her own unique vision; standing outside of any trends and re…
Helena Espvall and Masaki Batoh
Restocked, few available..."If the pentagrams and moccasins and ponchos of the now nearly bygone “freak folk” era made listening to Fairport Convention cool again, Helena Espvall and Masaki Batoh’s self-titled collaboration serves as a reminder that British longhairs of the ’60s were nerds, nerds, nerds. Cellist Espvall, best known for her work with Espers, and Batoh, the guitarist of Japanese psych band Ghost, deploy an arsenal of exotic stringed instruments. They play earnest cover…
in Tokyo
Four pieces of computer music. Iancu Dumitrescu \'Hazard and tectonics\' (2009 - 2013), \'Crepuscule I\' (2011-12), \'Early, before all times\' (2010-11). Ana-Maria Avram \'Metalstorm I\' (2012).
Tidal
Full colour digipak designed by Slavek Kwi. Limited to 300 copies. On 'Tidal' : Tidal zone is a fluid line between land and sea, a site of perpetual motion and metamorphoses. During 2008 - 2010 I collected a variety of sounds in coastal areas of Western and Southern Ireland and on the other side of Atlantic Ocean in Newfoundland, Canada: the remote fishing village of Conche, the ghost settlement of Crouse, and the St.Georges peninsula. I recorded underwater : crackles of decapods, dolphins, mink…
Perhaps
Limited double LP version. Recorded live on December 8, 2006 at a memorial event for James Tenney at California Institute of the Arts, Perhaps is Harold Budd sublimely distilled. Striking in its restraint and simplicity yet profoundly resonant in its depth and message, it is both eulogy to a departed friend and defining statement from an artist at the apotheosis of his career. Originally available only digitally (and only from Samadhisound's web site), Perhaps sees its first-ever and much-de…