New Arrivals
I am here where are you
After the great 2012 record by Brötzmann / Noble / Edwards, the worse the better, Peter Brötzmann and Steve Noble started to play some gigs as a duo. It worked out really well, wonderful pieces of music that had to be put on cd; an expert, you might even say telepathic, interplay between those two outstanding musicians, sometimes delicate and swinging, sometimes full-force free jazz.
Nepenthe
Julianna Barwick returns with the successor to 2011's charming The Magic Place. Given how successful that self-recorded LP was, it’s surprising to see that the Louisiana-born singer has looked to an external producer to document and frame her work this time around, namely Sigur Ros associate Alex Somers. Barwick once again uses delay-pedals to build heaven-scraping towers of chorused plainsong out of her earnestly, achingly pretty soprano, placing them in what John Foxx - whose 90s’ ambient reco…
An Anthology Of Noise & Electronic Music Vol 6
The sixth and penultimate edition in Sub Rosa's ongoing assembly of crucial noise and electronic music looks at the period 1957-2010. So far the series has been duly noted for its excavation and reappraisal of lesser known works by important artists and vol. 6 is no different, presenting 26 exclusive and original compositions including the work of Tzvi Avni, Joseph Nechvatal, and Kohei Gomi/Pain Jerk among better known titans of the avant garde such as Stephen O'Malley, Dick Raaymakers, J…
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…
A Crack-Up at the Race Riots
"'It's about a race war and it happens in Florida. And the Jewish people sit in trees. And the black people are run by M.C. Hammer. And the whites are run by Vanilla Ice. I wanted to write the Great American Choose Your Own Adventure novel.' -- Harmony Korine, addressing a national television audience, 10/17/97. Back in print from Harmony Korine, A Crack-Up at the Race Riots was originally published by Mainstreet/Doubleday in 1998. Korine's first novel presents fragments of a portrait in …
The Skipper at Home
Jazz-man Henry Franklin, widely respected for his service to the finest jazz players, brought that ineffable quality called soulfulness into play when he made his first record for producer George Porter at Black Jazz, The Skipper. Not unexpectedly, his follow-up affair titled The Skipper at Home teems with the same jaunty uplift. In sync with Franklin's musical spirit on the second recording are returnees Charles Owens on saxophone, Oscar Brashear on trumpet and Kenny Climax on guitar along wi…
Trainwrekz
Ensemble Skalectrik is a side-project of Nick "Ekoplekz" Edwards. Previous emissions include the self-released psycho-geographical abstraction of Snuff Mill Tapes and a homage to Maurizio Bianchi via Feral Tapes. Focusing entirely on spontaneous composition and one-take improvisation, Ensemble Skalectrik represents the most raw, extreme performance-based electronic music in Edwards' repertoire. On Trainwrekz, Edwards has dusted-off his turntables, grabbed a stack of old vinyl (mainly sound e…
The Voice of the Turtle
The Voice of the Turtle is one of the most beguiling albums from one of America's most legendarily beguiling musicians. Originally released in 1968 on his own Takoma label, Fahey credits some of the compositions and performances to the fictional guitarist Blind Joe Death, and some of the songs are actually rumored to not be Fahey at all but in fact obscure blues 78s. Whatever the case may be, it's one of Fahey's most adventurous and beautiful LPs, with the three lengthy improvisational pie…
Bamboo for two
"A Hypnagogic supergroup of sorts with a blast of hallucinatory and tropical rhythmic synth adventures - new on OESB! Comes with free download coupon redeemable from the label** Seductively heavy-lidded inter-species avian-eroticism from the hypnagogic allstars Spencer Clarke (Skaters), Lieven Martens (Dolphins Into The Future), Eva Van Duren (Orphan Fairytale) and James Ferraro (CEO Airhead Entertainment) on the ever-compelling OESB imprint. Monopoly Child Star Searchers is usually the reserve …
Sunrise
The music of My Education, a five-piece group from Austin, Texas, tends towards the classical side of the spectrum. If you’ve read any recent think-piece about how the lines between rock bands and classical ensembles are blurring, you could pretty easily swap their name into the list of case studies provided without sacrificing accuracy. Besides recording their own compositions, they’ve also released their take on Arvo Pärt’s taut “Spiegel im Spiegel” and collaborated with the hip-hop group däle…
Doomsdayer Holiday
Following up last year's Burning Off Impurities and their recent Take Refuge In Clean Living EP, Grails return with their darkest, heaviest record yet. Written and recorded over the last 18 months,Doomsdayer's Holiday delivers on the promises made by their previous albums, taking equal pride in smoky psychedelics and mountain-ascending riffs. With Faust, Earth and Sunn O))) collaborators acting as engineers - not to mention drummer Emil Amos having recently become the new other half of Om - Grai…
Stranded
Since 2002, Idea Fire Company has performed and recorded as a quartet with core members Karla Borecky and Scott Foust (me!), joined by Meara O'Reilly and Jessi Swenson. (Meara and Jessi, along with Matt Krefting, start in my finally completed feature-length film Here's To Love!). I feel this LP is as strong as any I've been involved in, and I feel pretty strongly about my body of work. Stranded is the perfect companion to Anti-Natural. Excellent Karla Borecky cover. 180 gram luxury object.
Strange Passion
Mindblowing comp of obscure, highest-calibre DIY Post-Punk and Synthwave from the archives, brilliantly compiled by Darren McCreesh and brought to you by Finders Keepers' Cache Cache sublabel - so damn good. There's been a deluge of post-punk reissues and rarity compilations in the past five years, and in turning their spades to the same ground, Finders Keepers have dug way deeper than anybody else, and come up with a cache lost classics that are both truly lost and truly classic - the quality c…
Hubble Drums
Planned since Hubble’s first live performance in September of 2010, Hubble Drums is an inspired record of new guitar music. Equal parts shred-fi, cyber-dread and fried psychedelia, Hubble Drums marks Ben Greenberg (of Zs and The Men)’s first full-length recording and debut for Northern Spy. Recorded at Python Patrol and lovingly mastered at Bonati Mastering, the CD and 150g LP features original artwork by Michael Yaniro and Ben Greenberg. “Hubble’s Hubble” serves as the soundtrack for a v…
Veterans of disorder
Back in play just to celebrate 14 years, 2 months and 12 days since its original release is Royal Trux's penultimate album, Veterans of Disorder. Coming off the fan-favorite Accelerator LP, it was clearly time to build on expectations, right? Uh... listen, maybe this isn't the band for you. Neil and Jennifer were fans of rock n roll to the finish, sure -- but in that, Royal Trux was a dyed-in-the-wool contrarian enterprise, rebels to the core, and everything they endeavored to was viewed from th…
Jedwabnik
More music involving the seemingly always-at-work Wojciech Kucharczyk (does the man ever sleep?), this time in a quartet alongside B a ej Król, Jerzy Mazzoll and Radek Dziubek. The project's title Dwutysi czny translates as 'two thousand' - referring, according to a brief recent interview with Easterndaze, to the year when Król first came across the music of the other three players, a discovery that eventually led him to write to them to ask if they'd donate him some of their recorded sounds to …
Red Riding: In the Year of Our Lord 1980
Blackest Ever Black presents the first vinyl edition of Dickon Hinchliffe's original score for 1980 -- the second part of Channel 4 and Revolution Films' Red Riding trilogy, adapted by Tony Grisoni from David Peace's quartet of novels and first screened in 2009. Each film in the Red Riding trilogy, a landmark achievement in British television history, was helmed by a different director and had its own distinctive look, sound and feel. While Julian Jarrold's 1974 and Anand Tucker's 1983 were bo…
Parallel / Grayscale
Parallel/Grayscale is the first collaborative work between Italian guitarist and composer Giuseppe Ielasi and French-Swiss composer and electroacoustic musician Kassel Jaeger. It is comprised of two different improvisation sessions. The first one took place in Paris, in October of 2011. The second happened in Oreno, in June of 2012, after the first concert Ielasi and Jaeger performed together. The first session was a pure analog device improvisation, whereas the second one was more laptop-o…
Corporate Laughter
Debut CD from one of Chicago's finest modular synth manipulators, Neil Jendon. One of the first things that struck me about Neil's work, when I saw him live, was his pacing. Neil would subtly build levels and layers of various oscillations, frequencies, and tones so deftly that by the time he was sending a hailstorm of electronic chaos out of the PA like buckshot, you almost had no recollection of how he got there without you being aware of it. 'Corporate laughter' reflects many of Jendon's fant…
Technological music
An oblique response to various antecedents of pulse-based electronic music without recourse to drum machines or sequencing (or — in the case of the Four Investigations — synthesizers). Tools include oboe, English horn, analogue synthesis and malfunctioning electric organs and piano. Mastered by Giuseppe Ielasi. Gratitude also to Niko Wenner and Monica Scott. Dedicated to Michael Randers-Pehrson, Jeff Bollaro, and HK Kahng — stalwart comrades in my very earliest electronic music misadventures.