New Arrivals
I am the Center: private issue new age music in America, 1950-90
One of the best things about Seattle label Light in the Attic’s new new age compilation I Am the Center is that it doesn’t try and pretend that new age music was something that it’s not. Look at the album’s cover illustration and you’ll see an angel-like creature carrying an orb of yellow light through the clouds; open the gatefold and you’ll see what appears to be a bird made of stars launching itself out of the ocean. Press play and be delivered into over two hours of mind-numbingly mellow mus…
Audience of one
On Audience of One, Oren Ambarchi, presents a four-part suite which moves from throbbing minimalism to expansive song-craft to ecstatic free-rock. While his previous solo albums for Touch have exhibited a clear progression towards augmenting and embellishing his signature bass-heavy guitar tones with fragile acoustic instrumentation, Audience of One, while also existing in clear continuity with his previous recordings, opens the next chapter in his catalogue of solo works. Remarkable in i…
Excerpts (& Half-Speeds)
Dan Melchior is known by many as a long-standing footsoldier of garage rock. Throughout his 15 years of service Dan has gained a reputation as being one of the few in his field willing to test the flexibility of an otherwise stagnant genre. Last year's brilliant Assemblage Blues LP (Siltbreeze) showed Dan scratching at the bars of his cage, restricted by the very domain he dominates. Excerpts (& Half-Speeds) is Dan Melchior's hammer in the mirror. A courageous act of self-vandalism, reduc…
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…
A Child Goes Burying Dead Insects
A rarity, while not being in higher atmospheres of any kind, the film "Kodomo Ga Mushi No Shigai Wo Umeni Iku" aka "A Child Goes Burying Dead Insects" forced up a third sleep state, third dream state and third reality check.., wishing the colours were really the colours one would see everywhere, instead of the disgusting digital prints or pixelated madness that get shoved up our body holes! It makes me wonder if I am really here right now or if I had seen the film before 2009 which is not …
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…
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…
Message From Era Ora
One of the most original and innovative Krautrock bands, Embryo fused traditional ethnic music with their own jazzy space rock style. Over their 40-year existence, during which Christian Burchard has been the only consistent member, the group has traveled the world, playing with hundreds of different musicians and releasing over 20 records. This is a never before released jams recorded live during 1976 in various locations. This is the only record of the collaboration with the italian jazz legen…
Hai kein Wal
Meeting between visual artist Beni Bischof and electronic musician Norbert Möslang. Limited to 200 copies and hand signed by artists. With this somewhat confused, absurd or primitive Bishop chant, the result could be to remembered as a crashing jumbo jet
Regressions ''Blinding Confusion''
"Over the past few years, iconic noise artist Nate Young has been carefully crafting his own signature solo sound, as evidenced through his progressive recordings and performances with American experimental music staples such as Wolf Eyes, Stare Case, Demons, and Moon Pool & Dead Band. Regression 'Blinding Confusion' enters a new era, retaining the techniques and studies from his previous work and raising them to new levels. Intense compositional building and structure seep through each t…
Body waves
On 22 February 2011, an earthquake measuring 6.3 on the Richter Scale hit Christchurch, which combined with a series of massive aftershocks destroyed huge swathes of the New Zealand city. At its epicentre in the port of Lyttelton, sound artist Jo Burzynska (Stanier Black-Five) grabbed a recording device as she ran from her home, leaving it running on her doorstep capturing the aftershocks that ricocheted though her house and the disaster unfolding on the street outside. This unique recording of …
Zones Without People
**Re-press on vinyl, now with download code redeemable from the label** OPN's 'Zones Without People' was released in 2009 on a highly limited vinyl run for Arbor. All seven tracks featured in his Wire chart-topping 'Rifts' compilation, predating his mindblowing 'Returnal' album (surely one of the best of 2010) and displaying its prodigiously gifted creator amidst some of his most affective synthscapes. From the outset we could consider this to be classic material, as the miniature 'Computer Visi…
Arf Arf
The Australian sound poetry / film-maker / artist group ARF ARF consists of Marisa Stirpe, Frank Lovece, Michael Buckley and Marcus Bergner. Between 1985 and 2000 they produced and mounted hundreds of live performances in Australia and Europe. Their film 'Thread of Voice' (featuring Bob Cobbing / Konkrete Canticle) has been shown widely including at The Serpentine Gallery (London), The Pompidou Centre (Paris), Arsenal Kino (Berlin), Millennium (New York) and at the Museum of Modern Art in…
Lieu
FaravelliRatti is a duo comprised of Nicola Ratti (guitar) and Attila Faravelli (computer) who play with a tower of different prepared speakers and a taper recorder in between them. The idea is to fed speakers with different languages in the same space and have them resonate with the phisical space. Every speaker is prepared and positioned so the resonance can be controlled by the players, moving their bodies around the sound totem in between them. Their live set represent this idea, of building…
African Songbird
Matsuli Music is proud is announce the re-issue of African Songbird, the masterpiece from South Africa's greatest jazz singer, Sathima Bea Benjamin. Originally released in 1976, African Songbird was a debut long overdue. The splendid vinyl reissue of African Songbird opens with a cavernous, spacious, enormous sound, Bea Benjamin’s voice is introduced by Dollar Brand’s plangent, lingering electric keyboards before the ensemble joins in like rolling thunder. The vibrant plucked bass (provided b…
A Rebours
Depuis que Minizza existe (le groupe se forme en 2000), ses membres ont toujours eu dans l'idée, un jour, d'adapter un roman en musique. Lorsque France Culture leur commande un Atelier de Création Radiophonique, l'occasion est saisie, et le choix se porte rapidement sur A Rebours (1884) de Joris-Karl Huysmans, chef-d'œuvre séminal, manifeste du décadentisme, dévoré par les membres du groupe dès l'adolescence.Ce travail pour France Culture donne naissance au troisième album du groupe qui, bien qu…
Opiate Sun
The EP might be the ideal format for Justin Broadrick's music, regardless of his alias. Whether he's trying to erase your head via concrete-slab guitars in Napalm Death, reduce techno to a series of clockwork hammerblows with Final, or massage your pleasure centers with neo-shoegaze in Godflesh, Broadrick's music has a laudable singularity. The three-or-four-song dose mainlines his all-consuming mood of the moment without the potential dilution of trying to fill up a CD. Broadrick claims to be …
Burning Off Impurities
Following soon after the critically praised Black Tar Prophecies collection on Important Records, Portland, Oregon's Grails return with their first proper studio album since 2004 release of Redlight. Burning Off Impurities - their debut for Temporary Residence Ltd. - makes good on the promise of those past releases in delivering an album that not only thrusts the group to new heights, but also significantly pushes the instrumental rock genre forward for the first time in nearly a decade. An incr…
Dance of the vampires
"Roman Polanski’s 1967 film ‘Dance Of The Vampires’ (as it was originally called, but more widely known by its re-named title ‘The Fearless Vampire Killers’, or ‘Pardon Me, But Your Teeth Are In My Neck’) is a camp horror cult classic. At the time the film was marketed as a ‘farce’, which overlooked the fact that this film is fantastically eerie. The major part played by the soundtrack in giving the film this effect cannot be understated, and the cold-as-snow production did much to enhance the b…
No Input Mixing Board #8
Toshimaru Nakamura returns with another outstanding full-length of no-input mixer improvisations. Hello, Dear…ah, anyone who takes this up in front of your eyes and ears. Here’s my new (in 2013) solo album. I hope you find it worthy enough to take your time and have a listen. It was recorded in one day. Compared to my previous releases, “Maruto” on Erstwhile Records (2 years to produce), “Egrets” on Samadhisound (5 years), it came to life quite quickly. Almost like it popped out. But it took thr…