New Arrivals
2nd Wave
In a fair and reasonable world, Roland Haynes would have compelled more attention than he did when his jazz-funk record 2nd Wave appeared on Black Jazz in the mid-1970s. Not to say the keyboardist was totally neglected back then, but he and other plugged-in pianists of his stylistic inclination (such as label-mate Doug Carn, Hampton Hawes, Don Grolnick, Larry Willis, and Gordon Beck) existed in the deep shadow cast by jazzman-turned-jazz-funk powerhouse Herbie Hancock, whose records with the H…
Graft
Graft is an album by Japanese noise master Masami Akita aka Merzbow. This LP album is pressed on lime-green vinyl in a "bootleg"-style sleeve and sealed with a sticker. Limited to 300 regular copies. According to the Merzbow blog, the design was inspired by a '70s Jethro Tull bootleg called My God, and the recording was inspired by the plant illustrations in the Voynich manuscript. Recorded in November 2009 at Munemi House, Tokyo.
Temple
'Temple' is the final installment in Jan Jelinek's series of four vinyl compilations that bring together the wide variety of his music: commissioned works, live recordings, collaborations with other musicians as well as unreleased material from the last five years. Temple stems from a collaboration with French-Canadian choreographer Sylvain Émard. Temple is a re-worked excerpt of the music for the dance piece Fragments – Volume I and is a 10 minute drone work that builds from nothing more than a…
Gills cut into woman
"Terrifying monster of the ages raging with pent-up passions! ...with every man his mortal enemy ...and a woman's beauty his prey! Could only her beauty tame its savage fury?""...forbidden depths!" Creature libertinage; voyeur of the women's legs enveloped in dark waters. The hosiery has been cast aside in exchange for a one-piece to enter the watery depths, setting the stage for obsessive creature tendencies targeted toward the shapes of Kay Lawrence, Helen Dobson, and Marcia Barton. Sam McKi…
The Mortimer Trap
The Mortimer Trap is an epic, 77-minute "variation" of Morton Feldman's For Bunita Marcus, constructed by German experimentalist and techno icon Thomas Brinkmann and Australian sound artist Oren Ambarchi. Pulsating waves of claustrophobic ambience generated from who-knows-what patiently builds into a throbbing, rhythmic pulse of gorgeous sonic density. Since the '80s, Thomas Brinkmann has experimented with sound, its textures and its construction methods. His custom-built two-arm turntable …
Ritual Totemic Stone
By now, the significance of Sam McKinlay's extensive body of work is undeniable. After having begun his mapping of the depths of monomania, fetish, addiction, and vice, in the mid-1990s with his flagship project, The Rita, McKinlay briefly halted his work in the early 2000s. Though it was unforeseeable at the time, McKinlay's return to substantial recording output and live performances around 2004 would quickly and permanently alter the landscape of Harsh Noise. The Rita became one of the most …
Amulet
Oren Ambarchi live recordings assembled on Cheryl Cole's iPhone at her house in Winnipeg. Not really, but it's that's how I first misread the description. Amulet actually presents two iPhone recordings assembled at Chez Cole, Winnipeg, July 2013 by the inestimable Oren Ambarchi. We've no further info but from what we can hear these are rudimentary iPhone recordings excerpted and crudely edited from a live performance (a shard of applause possibly gives the game away) between rippling, dynamicall…
Zack Gluck
Effortlessly fusing krautrock with jazz and ethnic music, Embryo were unparalleled in the world of progressive fusion and 1984's Zack Glück is one of their most ambitious and rewarding LPs. Flutes and saxophones mix with oud, marimba and violin to make an intoxication concoction. Originally released on Italian's Sonori label, Mirumir is pleased to present the very first official vinyl reissue of this prog classic.
Bellstomp / Pond Dance
Me, Myself & Ekoplekz present two versions of Tod Dockstader library production tunes from his 1979/1981 LPs for Aldwych stalwarts Boosey & Hawkes...one veers towards saline techno, the other remains a resolute radiophonic bubbler...both of us are well chuffed to have had the chance to tamper with the wiley tape sage's great work ...BM
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…
Resorts & Ruins
In “Resorts & Ruinsâ€Â, a set of three recent sound works, Kyriakides deals with several themes in both a physical and narrative sense. All the pieces use source material that highlight specific vocal traditions, namely Turkish pop music, Cypriot epic song, and Baroque opera, but they also all make extensive use of other forms of speech and vocal acts. In “Varosha (Disco Debris)â€Â, a narrating voice is our tour-guide in the ruins of the Cypriot ghost town Varosha; the many fragm…
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.
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…
Vaseline Race
Here’s a very limited coloured vinyl thing by Cicciolina Holocaust. There’s one of those photocopied pictures on the front where I’m pretty sure I don’t want to look at it for long enough to figure out what’s going on, much like Urashima seem to specialise in - it looks like some people are doing something very bad to another person. The tracks here originally came out on cassette in 1984 and have been remastered for this release.It’s dark industrial droney harsh no…
Spilt
Nate Young airs two of his alter egos on this great split LP: Demons, featuring Steve Kenney (oh you know, Steve Kenney - he's in those well-known beat combos The Pterodactyls and Isis & Werewolves.... No?) and Hatred, which combines Young once again with Kenney, but this time with the added presence of Spence Bryant. The Hatred side sounds like the motor on your turntable is continually breaking down, as if some perpetual Technics power-down effect was causing all manner of primitive pitch-slid…
Stromboli
Field recordings of a volcano by Geir Jenssen, better known as Biosphere. Stromboli is an active volcano off the north coast of Sicily in the Mediterranean. The volcano has erupted many times, and is constantly active with minor eruptions, often visible from many points on the island and from the surrounding sea, giving rise to the island's nickname Lighthouse of the Mediterranean. The last major eruption was on April 13, 2009. Recorded at Stromboli's crater edge (924 m) on July 19th 2012…
Nocturnes
Vittelli continues to set out its’ stall with this brilliant LP by Australian sound maker Matthew Philip Hopkins (Vincent Over the Sink / The Bowles / Naked on the Vague / Half High). This is Hopkins’ first solo vinyl outing after a decade of micro-edition cassettes and CDR’s. Nocturnes was assembled during late night headphone sessions at Hopkins’ Sydney home in late 2013. He employs synth, cassettes, fx pedals, contact mic and random objects to create a hypnotic suite of dramatic and highly ev…
In Search of the Lost Divine Arc
Deluxe double LP pressed in an edition of 1000 copies, housed in a gatefold sleeve.Acid Mothers Temple\'s In Search of the Lost Divine Arc heads in a completely different direction from 2012\'s Son of a Bitches Brew. Harder, faster, and more riff-rock oriented, this record is here to slay. AMT skews their vibe between Zeppelin and Beefheart, coming out with another classic Acid Mothers ripper in the process
Object lessons
Object Lessons is a musical collaboration between Justin Lieberman and C. Spencer Yeh. The record is a spoken rendition of select object descriptions from the Corrector's Custom Pre-Fab House that were reworked into an experimental music format utilizing electronics and an amplified violin. Object Lessons is a limited edition of 250.