New Arrivals
Body issues
Patricia's warm, fuzzy post-techno-house slots neatly with the Opal Tapes aesthetic on his debut album, 'Body Issues'. Six tracks come off like a boosted 1991 or Huerco S, pushing malleable bass hits below swirling streaks of melody bursting with ferric quality. There's firm parallels to be made here with Anthony Naples, albeit with a noisier bent in 'Hissy Fit', whilst on 'Melting' juicy acid forms over a brittle jack track and the sweet-but-slamming 'Jospehine' and 'Plural' appear like some GH…
End Line
Ottaven new LP issued in a tiny run of 100 copies only, a strong and puzzling mixture of tapes, electronics, varispeeding, and multiple exposures, carefully executed, with much precision and clarity. Flipping between noisily bristling electronic frequencies and blustery washes of oscillating tones, Ottaven sounds carefully programmed even in its most frentic moments, and offers several blasts abrasive enough to unclog the dirtiest pore.
Scarcity
During drummer Paal Nilssen-Love's July 2013 solo gig at Auido Rebel's Quintavant in Rio de Janeiro Brazil, he was joined on stage by Arto Lindsay performing on electric guitar and voice. The result is this 180 Gram LP, one side at 33 RPM and one at 45 RPM presenting two improvisations from these powerful improvisers. Of the performance Nilssen-Love writes: The gig was organised by the guys running Audio Rebel i Rio... fantastic guys who's also musicians. Gig was amazing and we we're both drench…
Jailhouse Rock
"It's been a while since Scorces sorceress, Jandek collaborator, and Volcanic Tongue branch manager Heather Leigh has ventured out on vinyl under her own name. And it may be a while longer, as Jailhouse Rock is in fact a wax reissue of a long OOP 2006 cassette classic on Michigan crud factory Fag Tapes. It was a fave of ours that year (and every year), so it feels extra celebratory to be able to offer up a freshly remastered (by Pete Swanson) LP edition of the album for global re-appreciation. S…
Polyphtong
Polyphtong was conceived as a live quadraphonic composition for voice and computer. It was premiered at Stanford University in March of 2012. In August of 2013, Blonk radically reworked the piece to create the stereo version presented on this album. All sounds heard in it are derived from Blonk's vocals. Spatial placement and movement are extended by electronic means. The phonetic concepts of diphtong and approximant are an important focus in the more meditative sectons of the work. It also uses…
Landform Erosion
Landform Erosion In the sequence of the debut album Landform, Fujako releases Landform Erosion, into the cosmic wilderness of haunted grounds and landscapes. The telluric evocation of the underworld through bass and echo involves this time a new set of collaborations, a group of producers were invited to remix sound coming from the previous Landform. REMIXERS | SPECTRE explorer into the realm of low frequency manipulation, TZII Brussels based musician and video artist, the second half of …
L'experience acoustique
Francois Bayle's 'L'Experience Acoustique', Realised between 1966-1972 using the best technology available at the time, this 2 hour opus, powerful and immense in its scope, which explores a universe of electronic sounds and sound relationships. It's an investigation of acoustic sound at its purest levels and borders on psychedelic in effect. Chopping material from the world around him, manipulating it and juxtaposing against other, unlikely sources with illusive sleight-of-hand and haptic te…
Improvisations
Stunningly beautiful harmonium improvisations recorded in 1949 by spiritualist G.I Gurdjieff. Many who heard these performances live found themselves crying uncontrollably. After this cathartic listening experience they reached a place where they felt happy and whole. We hope this record will bring a similar experience to the modern day listener. It doesn't get much purer than this. Cover is silkscreened with gold ink. A co-release with Psychic Sounds Research."An extraordinary collection of har…
Self Title
There are no words to say how amazing the Heinz Hopf's debut album is. They are a harsh noise duo consisting of Matthias Andersson and Dan Johansson. The first is the mind behind the label Release the bats, and the second is the man behind the moniker Sewer Election. The result is 32 minutes of pure, brutal and uncompromising harsh noise. Comparisons with Incapacitants is too easy, their love of the Japanese noise is too evident. Comparisons that do not lead to the cloning of a sound. Thei…
Electronic Vol. 2
Mordant Music beautifully join the dots between the hauntological zeitgeist and original library music with the 2nd of two vinyl reissues of seminal tape music by Tod Dockstader. Born 1932 in Saint Paul, Minneapolis, Dockstader majored in psychology and art but would go on to explore his interests in painting and film as an apprentice editor in Hollywood. This led to a job as a sound engineer in 1958, employed at Gotham Recording studios, where he started meticulously composing during lon…
Ask the dust
Hailing from Northern California, John Davis is a sound artist, composer and filmmaker who has released music on labels such as Root Strata and Digitalis. With “Ask the Dust,” he offers up a moving suite of compositions made using a plethora of instrumentation including guitar, piano, tape loops, Max/MSP, field recordings and the newest addition to his arsenal, a complex assortment of Blacet synthesizer modules. Davis uses the synth not as the crux of his recordings but as a tool among many in h…
Music Of Changes
The title is a double pun. The score is the first that John Cage devised allowing the hexagrams of the I Ching to fully determin e how the music would procee d, event by event, gesture by gesture—the musical details (pitch, duration, dynamic s, density, tempi) being painstakingly, albeit fortuitously, derived through point-by-point con sultation from charts of possi bilities designed by the composer. (Christian Wolff, Cage’s young friend and musical associate, had presented Cage with a co…
Imaginary Softwoods
Three years ago, a triple cassette oddity appeared out of nowhere adorned in washed-out nature collages and zero information. Turns out that John Elliot of Emeralds was behind the madness, and after further dissection of the sounds enclosed and it all began to make sense.Those three tapes (one yellow, one blue, one red) were the first taste of something that felt like a lost private-press object from the early European electronic experimentations of the '60s & '70s. Each vignette is its own stor…
Arghiledes
Arghiledes' is a brilliant homage to Greek Rebetiko music of the early 20th century by No Neck Blues Band's David Shuford aka D. Charles Speer. It's his 2nd solo LP under this moniker and a deeply researched, beautifully executed effort replete with in depth sleeve notes and paste-on cover. Coming from a Blues playing American of Greek descent, the project reflects the syncretic nature of Rebetiko music, itself made up of the many disparate elements which formed Greek urban folk music (European …
Monstrance
Now also on vinyl.Mika Vainio, Electric Guitar, Processing, Metallic Percussion. Joachim Nordwall, Electronics, Electric Bass Guitar, Metal Objects, Hammond Organ, Vibraphone.Recorded in Berlin at Studio Schwedenstrasse one day in June 2010. Recording Engineer: Marco Paschke. Mixed and Mastered by Daniel Karlsson in Stockholm at Elektronmusikstudion. Mika Vainio was a member of the legendary minimal electronic duo Pan Sonic. Emerging from the Finnish industrial and rave music scene in the early …
Boring Embroidery
Boring embroidery features five beautiful, fragile yet raw improvisations for pianos and electronics performed by two of the UK's brightest talents. Picking up from where 2010's Turned moment, weighting release on Another Timbre left off, Boring Embroidery inhabits a slow, precise musical world that references Feldman and Tudor, yet remains resolutely improvised. Recorded in 2010 and 2011, this album possibly marks the end of the duo's piano collaborations but if so, it provides a perfectly matu…
Split LP
When does modern composition become drone?  When the original elements are sunk into a sea of strings, brass and electronics, as they are on this evocative split release.  Each of the artists composes, but in a modern fashion, either by manipulating source elements or by rearranging them to make a different sort of sense.  Both pieces are based on recordings of the Antonio Lomatto choir, conducted by Davide Mainetti.  The phantoms of these recordings remain, spectral yet in…
Death Set
"JAMES JACKSON TOTH, aka WOODEN WAND, is your fearless friend, the stumbling guy who gets himself into incredibly fucked up situations but comes out shining and lives to tell about it, entertaining you safely and immensely. You should be grateful. In my view, he's a great American songwriter in full bloom. Most likely you'll think that's a preposterous claim, and I won't blame you, but you'll be totally, completely, and unforgivably wrong not to agree. To me, it's obvious Toth is animated with t…
Conflict
Continue reprints of the amazing tapes by Pierpaolo Zoppo aka Mauthausen Orchestra released on Aquilifer Sodality in the early eighties (Conflict also released on Broken Flag). Tape after tape Mauthausen Orchestra constitute, in a few years, the backbone of what we will know as an alienating and extremist style, made of metal nightmares and sonic torture , often dilated, dissected and extended up to the limit of endurance. Conflict carry us, once again, as real rituals of a civilization without …
Juv
Awesome release, stark, doom-laden ambience with an oppressive undertone. Sombre tones flow like lifeblood, underlying squeals of pain, abrasive bursts of metallic guitar drones, atonal meanderings, the occasional cosmic chant, all blurred by a rumbling dirge of noise...somewhere between Tony Conrad, Giacinto Scelsi and Sunn O