New Arrivals
Yesterday & Today
Double vinyl LP pressing includes bonus CD pressing of this 2009 release. The Field is Axel Willner, and 2007's Here We Go Sublime was one of the year's most acclaimed releases, receiving a 9.0 from Pitchfork as well as universal praise. It was a soundtrack to the spit-shined airport of your dreams - faceless, futuristic, and fuzzy. Now, Willner expands his palette, continuing the oblique sampling strategy while building up the rhythmic architecture.
Knot Invariants
Rotated and submerged. Drawn tight below the surface. Remnants of hair, string and wood.Tied across and back. Knot Invariants is Helena Gough’s third album. It was created using source material derived solely from recordings of cellists Anthea Caddy and Anton Lukoszevieze.
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…
The Somnambulist's Tale
An early and one of the most special Gnod recordings is out now on Aguirre. The Somnambulist's Tale consists of two sidelong adventurous pieces which are carried by an incredible loop. The haunting ambience in combination with electronics, distant guitar layers, conversations between the band members, a typewriter, and other sounds from found objects makes this quite an atypical Gnod release, but definitely a great one. Influenced by early Krautrock bands like Can, Hawkwind and Ash Ra Temple, G…
Wake Up Awesome
The second chapter of SStudios (Software Studio Series). SStudios is a new venture in the Software Recording Co.'s expanding catalog that invites artists in the field of electronic music to create collaborative works of quality and vision. Inspired by the historical intersections of live performance and studio post-production, Wake Up Awesome is a modern kind of fusion in technique as well as genre. At its core are three artists highly experienced with both instant and labored composition.…
Elegy for Bangalore
The sound/video installation-project 'Eye Contact with the City' (recipient of an Honorary Mention at PRIX Ars Electronica 2011) was the outcome of an artists' residency in Bangalore in the autumn of 2010. The primary materials used in the installation were the field recordings made and video footage shot at various locations in Bangalore. Materials also included retrieved audio from old reel-to-reel tapes found at the city's flea markets. The extensive repository of field recordings and other a…
Shell-shocked
Meirino has been crossing fabricated, gathered, altered, provoked or wrong sounds for nearly two decades. The second Noisendo release follows the first one (Gorgomilos) closely - chronologically speaking - and dives deeper into a DIY electronica where machines dictate as much law as Man. Mutual respect? The obvious punk drive of Noisendo001 is more subtle in 002 but it is present in the nervous breathing of the acoustic and synthetic sounds that excite our senses while listening to this r…
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…
Menses
*Numbered edition of 206 copies pressed on 180 gram Menstrual Blood Red vinyl* Reissue of the private LP edition of 300 copies from 1981; the pyramidal construction of these two 'suites,' with its intentionally brutal and grotesque deformations, elaborates on overflowing and apocalyptical collapse, dragging a completely dissolvent conception of the world and of the para-industrial sound. Bonus tracks: 'Milan Bruits' from the Fix Planet! comp (Ata Tak) and the two tracks first issued in the v…
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…
Filme I
MM schumend. Wepa. Wirbel und einzelene Schlge für kleine Trommel. Ertrumtes Konzert. 34 Photos - Solo Performance 1986. SÂÂÂÂJ is someone, who, austere and prosaic, but with subliminal passion pays attention to the \'things\': in particular the lackluster \'byproducts\', the bulky till tongue-tied circumstances, the useful coverings of the alleged precious where he draws out the last, extracts a ghost. Thomas Groetz. Video dokumentation by Teresa Iten. 16 page booklet with a text by Thomas Gr…
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…
Uberfallig
Bureau B reissues Günter Schickert's album Überfällig, originally released in 1979 on Sky Records. "No sooner had electronic music broken through in Germany, principally aligned in the two schools of Düsseldorf and Berlin, than Günter Schickert also began his first musical experiments. Although GAM, the group he founded in 1973, did not then release a record, he did issue his first solo effort, Samtvogel, a year later -- an album which was eagerly snapped up and re-released by the Brain lab…
Blue Clouds
Some cream for your acid-folk tea - hitherto unreleased sides from the two and a half bards (well, two bards and a maiden - forsooth!) who self-released All On the First Day back in '72. These include studio recordings from later in the 70s, a couple live songs and an outtake from the legendary album itself! Well, the first legendary album anyway - for Blue Clouds is clearly another.
Virgins
Virgins was recorded during three periods in 2012, mostly in Reykjavik, Montreal and Seattle, using ensembles in live performance. The sound palette of this work is wider, almost 'percussive' and tighter sounding than previous works. While this album remains committed to a painterly form of musical abstraction, it is also a record of restrained composition recorded live primarily in intimate studio rooms. This record employs woodwinds, piano and synthesizers towards an effort at doing what digit…
Record Store Record
If you cant come to our shop, then maybe our shop can come to you. no, this is not a collection of in-store performances, there are no bands or artists trying to impress you with their skillz and technique - this is a collection of location/environmental recordings made inside our record stores, just the sound of regular everyday customers looking at records, talking about records, buying records - oh yeah, and record store owners boxing up records for mail-order customers - audio verite, sound …
F/C
Michael Mantra creates Ambient music. But more than that, he creates audio tools for "brain hemisphere synchronization": going beyond the synchronization of mind and body, Mantra's techniques are a mean to release endorphins, which are part of the human body's natural pharmacy and work at the same level of opiates. Michael creates his soundscapes mixing modulating high and low harmonic synthesizers tones (low deep drones and high resonating harmonics) with didgeridoo, ocean waves, rain, water, …
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…
Barn Nova
After five years and 20-plus albums-- most released on their own Child of Microtones label-- MV & EE's 2006 move to Ecstatic Peace began on a high note. "East Mountain Joint", the opening track on Green Blues, is a hypnotic hymn to unscheduled freedom, and it's catchy without losing the duo's loose, do-what-we-feel-like vibe. In fact, it's so entrancing that it's made subsequent work by Matt Valentine, Erika Elder, and their various colleagues seem like insufficient attempts to recapture…
Wooden Veil
This Berlin-based group combining the talents of artists Marcel Türkowsky, Hanayo, Christopher Kline, Domink Noé and Jan Pfeiffer, who each seem to spread themselves between a number of different projects. Interestingly, Noé is credited as a member of "krautrock legends Lustfaust", which is the fictional band created by conceptual artist Jamie Sholvin for the 2006 Beck's Futures exhibition, which might prompt you to think that Wooden Veil re made up too. There's definitely some sort o…