New Arrivals
The Last Great Challenge In A Dull World
Peter Jefferies's extraordinary debut solo album, The Last Great Challenge in a Dull World, first saw life as a cassette via the Xpressway label of Port Chalmers, New Zealand, in 1990. As a result of some international underground acclaim in fanzines and mailorder catalogs -- for both the album and a striking 7-inch, 'The Fate of the Human Carbine,' released around the same time -- it soon appeared on LP and CD as well, through the Ajax label of Chicago. Within a couple of years it slipped…
Mad Dog\'s Hustle
A too long unheard blacksploitation soundtrack from the Fantasy Productions house -- grooves from the pool of players who laid down the sounds on Secret Stash's fantastic Porno Groove compilation -- the score for the very little seen and long lost Mad Dog's Hustle from 1974! The music is credited to The Upstroke -- the same unidentified musicians from Fantasy's adult film scores -- and in a similar fashion to the porno soundtrack material, they're working very much in the appropriate idiom, but …
s/t
"Marissa Nadler's Kickstarter funded self-titled self-release. Brian McTear produced the album, which Nadler says is the 'most honest, natural record' of her career." "You'll want this music to never end...best severe and complex emotions that we've possibly never recognized in this or previous lives." -- LA Weekly
Testacoda
Jérôme Noetinger is an improviser and composer of electroacoustic music based in Rives (near Grenoble), France. He plays Revox, tapes and radio. SEC_ is the moniker of Mimmo Napolitano, an electronic musician and sound engineer from Naples, Italy. He plays Revox, no-input feedback, laptop, electronic devices. Together these two play the kind of improvised electronic mayhem that put Europe on the map. Testcoda features two separate recordings of shapeshifting electronics. One side recorded…
Tbriz
Reinhold Friedl, inside-piano, prepared piano, piano. Hannes Strobl, electric bass guitar, electric upright bass, electronics. Hayden Chisholm, alto saxophone. Composed and produced by Hannes Strobl and Reinhold Friedl, Berlin 2008 - 2013. P.O.P. (Psychology of Perception) Which sounds are similar to each other, which different, which repeated, which varied, which altered? Instrumentally played repetitions, digital repetitions in the effect path of the electric bass, repetitions in another posit…
Mobilisation Generale
Born Bad Records, the on-point French label that has brought you some of our favorites of the year, will release this week a compilation of French protest jazz from the 70s called Mobilisation Generale. The compilation, which you can stream below, is a fantastic look at a small slice of history that could use a little more attention. On BBR's Bandcamp, an entire oral history is written out to accompany the release, which features some truly innovative freeform jazz and poetry, and we've reprinte…
Automatic Music, Volume II
Automatic Music: Volume II' is the mesmerising follow-up to John Chantler's self-released first volume, originally released in 2011, the same year as his 'The Luminous Ground' LP was charted in The Wire's annual top 50. Two extended pieces for synthesiser/organ yield contrasting results on each side. First, 'For Nuno' is the more melodic of the two, with melting, kinetic modular scree and wheezing organ motifs seemingly attempting to untangle a conundrum which only gets more perplexing across it…
Swisher
The Blondes duo refract their house abstractions through a smudged psychedelic prism on 2nd album 'Swisher' for RVNG Intl. Picking up where their eponymous debut left off, Sam Haar and Zach Steinman start with the kosmic organ swell and atom-split rhythms of 'Aeon' before locking down to a driving, technoid momentum with 'Bora Bora' which carries through the album in the glyding dub-house gait of 'Andrew' to the ornate, future-baroque arpeggios of 'Poland' to the laser-grabbing, Belgian-styled t…
Sonatas & Interludes
How rare, and valuable, it is to be able to experience one composer’s masterwork through the sensibility of another significant, stylistically distinct composer – via a performance that reveals unexpected aspects of both. that is to say, an approach to performance not as an act of self-conscious, flamboyant or dramatic interpretation, according to the concerns of technique, expression, and projection that are at the heart of an instrumentalist’s presentation of a musical score to an audie…
Plays Bee Mask
Double LP version. In hindsight, the pairing of Chris Madak and Donato Dozzy was inevitable from the moment when the two connected on Mount Naeba, Japan at the storied Labyrinth party last fall. Both artists have worked to craft singular visions unlike anything else happening in electronic music today, yet despite each producer's unmistakable individuality, there is a deeper reservoir of shared sensibility between them which makes Donato Dozzy Plays Bee Mask feel like a logical and necessar…
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…
Live from the Sahara
The Kel Tamasheq people of the Sahara respect an ancient social order of noble families supported by lesser nobles, craftsmen and former slaves. Noble princes never would pick up a musical instrument -- that was for the craftsman, the griot, the professional bard, or the lesser nobles. But all that has changed during the droughts and rebellions of the past 50 years. The whole social order has been challenged. In the 1970s, electric guitars appeared in the desert. Everything began to c…
Split
Debut vinyl release for both of these great artists who collectively have had releases on a host of excellent underground labels such as Stunned Records, Housecraft, Sturmundrugs Records and Digitalis. Black Eagle Child is the musical project of Michael Jantz, and this release is his second outing for Blackest Rainbow following his excellent Kite Excursions CDR a while back. Here he presents us with 4 tracks of skillful guitar finger picking layered with glockenspeil, accordian and some perfectl…
KK Null + The Noiser
KK Null (computer, kaospad, voice, member of Zeni Geva). The Noiser (machines, kaospad, voice, member of Formanex). For few years now KK Null and The Noiser had been playing together through Europe giving their best version of a new noise and contemporary music mixing critical beats, electroacoustic composition combined with improvised sound poetry and extreme post-punk. This first album of their collaboration, released by Monotype Records, is a glimpse of their relation to live acts and studio …
Caim in Bird Form
Opal Tapes' visionary bossman Stephen Bishop synthesises spellbinding post-techno ecologies on his debut slab of wax as Basic House. 'Caim In Bird Form' is an engrossing refinement of the arcane, buckled structures and textures best heard on his 'I'm Not A Heaven Man' album and an excellent split with Prostitutes for Blowing Up The Workshop. It's a sound that was conceived in relative isolation, yet feels intrinsically plugged into the zeitgeist and highly aware of fringe actions in the wake of …
Sung In Broken Symmetry
Describing the music of Aquarelle's Ryan Potts is a difficult task indeed. It's related to the hazy, heavily treated output of musicians such as Fennesz and Tim Hecker, but one would be remiss to locate it solely within the realm of electronic ambient or drone, as there are often strong organic, rhythmic and composerly elements to Potts' work. In fact, the title of his last record, Slow Circles, might offer the best point of access into the Aquarelle aesthetic, in which compositional trop…
Mauricio Kagel Ludwig van
Mauricio Kagel’s 1970s film Ludwig Van, a rather critical piece of avant-garde cinema, asked pointed questions about the ways in which later audiences appropriate and interprete Beethoven’s music. Pianist F. Blondy and turntablist DJ LENAR reclaim and reinterpret the soundtrack in this post-modern mashup that includes source material such as Herzog soundtracks, a lecture by Alfred Cortot, samples of string playing and percussion from contemporary improvisation records, and numerous other …
Continuation
Recorded in the 1960s with Marshall Allen featured on Jupiterian flute and Danny Thompson on Neptunian libflecto. The original LP was pressed in very small numbers at the end of the 60′s, with purposely mislabeled details in the liner notes in typical fashion to Ra’s output during that phase. The contents are believed to be from 1963-64, a period that produced some of the composers most revered works and an era when Ra relocated to New York from Chicago. What we do know about Continuation i…
A living room at the bottom of a lake
gorgeous LP by this Leeds duo whose first half lives in London (and loves Whitehouse and Rush) and the other in Berlin (and loves Farley Jackmaster Funk). With several releases on labels such as Chocolate Monk, American Tapes, Troniks, Hospital Productions, or their own: Alcoholic Narcolepsy, Luke and Steven have been crafting and sculpting their psychedelic-electronic-noise-drone sound for over half a decade. But who cares and what does that sound description mean anyway? If you ask them,…
Keep An Eye Out
Table of the Elements continues to celebrate its 15th anniversary with the tenth installment in its Guitar Series Vols. 3 & 4. It’s a 12xLP romp of deviant fretnoise by some of experimental music’s most prominent players, including Christian Fennesz, Thurston Moore, and Sunn O)))’s Stephen O’Malley. Sunn O))) founder Stephen O’Malley summons a mesmerizing drone, absorbing the listener into an aural tar pit of deep, inexorable oblivion. He wears a cloak of post-metal allegiances with behemoths li…