New Arrivals
Ritual Totemic Stone
By now, the significance of Sam McKinlay's extensive body of work is undeniable. After having begun his mapping of the depths of monomania, fetish, addiction, and vice, in the mid-1990s with his flagship project, The Rita, McKinlay briefly halted his work in the early 2000s. Though it was unforeseeable at the time, McKinlay's return to substantial recording output and live performances around 2004 would quickly and permanently alter the landscape of Harsh Noise. The Rita became one of the most …
Surfaces
Gianluca Favaron returns on Silentes with the second release in the prestigious “Private Sounds” series. Besides having published some solo works, Favaron is part of Under The Snow along with Stefano Gentile and collaborates with Ennio Mazzon on the Zbeen project. In the past he has released music as Ab'she and was part of Lasik Surgery along with Pierpaolo Zoppo. Among his most recent releases we remember his collaboration with Corrado Altieri entitled "The System of Objects". "Surfaces" is a m…
In Solo
Restocked, very last copies around: Doyle is another matter. This man is dangerous - he never plays anything you could recognize, just furious blasts of rage. His solo on "Domiabra" couldn't be written down, or even sorted out. It sounds more like raw energy than anything I've ever heard. He's nasty, man." These liner notes to the original issue of Noah Howard's 'The Black Ark' may define perfectly also this new, incredible album by Arthur Doyle, this time 'in solo' for sax, flutes and voi…
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…
1986-1991
"The Venom P. Stinger retrospective is on. One of the roughest groups of the '80s is back in print on vinyl and for the first time ever on CD, and still nice and hard and rough and wild on either format. File under: punk rock/noise rock/free-of-constraints rock. If you think of Venom P. Stinger simply as the proving ground for 2/3rds of the Dirty Three first, then you're seriously missing it, and fuck you. It was the mid-'80s and everything was going fine. The music underground was its ow…
So Unreal
Episode two in season one of the LA Vampires Collab Chronicles finds her joining forces with elusive alien discotech-head Matrix Metals of the nomadic Outer Limits Recordings cabal. Blurry ornate cassette-loop architectures groove and grind under jazzy Casio canopies while Ms. LA Vamps screws it all down and layers in additional square wave keyboard lines, echo chamber FX, drum machine detailing, low-end throbs, and sings lead on a gold spraypainted microphone. The entire LP's got that '…
Greek Rhapsody - Instrumental Music from Greece 1905-1956
Greek Rhapsody -- Instrumental Music from Greece 1905-1956 is a 2CD collection featuring 42 tracks meticulously remastered from 78rpm recordings of Greek instrumentals (1905 to 1956). Many tracks are rare and never previously reissued on CD or vinyl; some are taken from the only known copies, while previously reissued tracks are here offered in far superior sound quality. This compilation offers, for the first time, a unique panorama of the instruments and styles of the Greek music of the…
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…
Tobel II
Reinhold Friedl, inside piano. Franck Vigroux, electronics. 'An encounter between two worlds. Reinhold Friedl and Franck Vigroux are two musicians, both addicted to a real contemporary approach, getting to the core of sound but by very different means. Reinhold Friedl with his purely acoustic instrument and his highly developed and refined inside-piano techniques meets Franck Vigroux with his electronics including all kind of devices from tape recorders to analog synthesizers. Their sole purpos…
Split LP
Alo Girl is an obscure Italian noise project that keep with-in deeper roaring and at times almost subterranean obsessive & paranoid tones through-out the piece, as well as managing to keep the sound tinged with a nice sleazy and airless atmosphere.Last Rape is a Richard Ramirez project that saw its debut in 1995. This harsh noise/HNW project remained untouched until 2005 relaunched with Naoki Chisato (ex-Forced Orgasm). In 2008, Sean Matzus (In The Land of Archers) replaced Chisato and is…
The Nethack Dictionary
In March 2005, drummer Teun Vergruggen (Jef Neve Trio, Flat Earth Society) invited the eccentric guitar player Mauro Pawlowski (dEUS, Somnambula) and Rhodes/piano wizard Jozef Dumoulin (Määk Spirit, Magic Malik, Octurn) to play a single session based on pure improvisation. The result left most people wondering how to categorize this music, and brought Othin Spake on the stage for many concerts. Six years later, the band has played in many jazz and alternative venues in Europe, released three …
In The Mouth - A Hand
2LP version, featuring one track not on the CD. Rune Grammofon presents the third album from Swedish trio Fire! -- something of a supergroup with members from already well-known projects. And again, it's a collaboration, this time with the extraordinary and prolific guitarist Oren Ambarchi. With their heavy, hypnotic, psychedelic rock'n'jazz explorations, they have carved out a different sound than any of the groups they are normally associated with. Sax player, improviser, composer and fer…
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…
Leave/Trace
Formerly operating under the name of Mites, Shakhnes has been recording and performing in Tel Avi, Israel since 2008. His work has been issued both privately in limited handmade CD-R editions, and internationally though Alamut Records (Jerusalem), Mystery Sea (Belgium), and Copy For Your Records (NYC). Consider 'leave/trace' a graduation ceremony, as Shakhnes steps away from pseudonymity and into the bright lights of his own exceptional music."leave/trace" offers a compelling display of mu…
Avast!
Avast! was created from field recordings made between 2009 and 2012 in Lyttelton, a volcanic harbour on the South Island of New Zealand. Sounds were captured at sites around the natural ampthitheatre of this extinct caldera: from abandoned wartime bunkers on the top of the crater rim to the port and its cacophony of cargo ships, tugs and workshops. The work is also haunted by the resonance of buildings such as the Timeball Station, which were destroyed when the town was at the epicentre of a maj…
Nihtes niht
'The music supposed to be a soundtrack for lonely ice-soundscapes... when you stand there on lonely wide inhuman places and feel lost, but you still stand on ice...' - Baraka[H] The newest collaboration between masters of evocative noise/drone ambient is divided into four long tracks, four directions of nothing. The tracks are entitled in middle ageindo-german language, for north, east, south, west. And the album title means nothing from nothing - very weird notion, as it doesn't exist anymore i…
Blues Sermon With Congregation
The first vinyl document of the Dredd and MV & EE collab recordings, this is a reissue of two deep sides originally released in 2004, as companion volumes to Kissing the Contemporary Bliss, in extremely limited runs. The sessions behind this record represent a singular apex of high in the catalogs of both Dredd Foole and MV & EE, where the playing and being of each of the three individuals involved coalesces into a singularly cosmic perception and extrapolation of the blues doctors' truth…
El Acero del Partido/Heroe del Trabajo
Limited vinyl reissue of the first LP from Spanish industrial band Esplendor Geométrico. An industrial classic originally released in 1982 on the Tic Tac label, Esplendor Geométrico's sound was already devoid of aggressive lyrics and even titles for their tracks (the A-side, El Acero del Partidio, is spread across five tracks while the B-side, Héroe Del Trabajo, has three tracks). Their sound had already begun to acquire a personality of its own, not fully mature but with an astounding aus…
Probability A: three studies for compositions of infinite lenght
Probability A collects three pieces composed by William Hutson between 2009 and 2012. Over the past seven years Hutson’s project Rale has evolved to incorporate more negative space into the music. The three pieces herein contained were recorded as proofs-of-concept; they are tracks that Hutson made to loop indefinitely in his house as he built up the courage to use long silences in what is supposed to be a noise/drone act.
William Hutson began recording and performing as Rale in 2006. He …
