New Arrivals
Februar
Within the four-tenth-hasty Suite February von Luigi Archetti the individual musical-acoustic events seem to have out-pulled in individual sound-pure from the being silent background. Looking for, a "Hinhoeren" and emphasizing hidden, electrifying sound particle. The attempt is to be given to the shade of the music a voice. Klangliche atmospheres through-cross feeling and conception. Fourteen ephemeren sound places, arranges for the listener a music, which reciprocates between imagination, expec…
Atonal drone
Rarely you remember the moment you listen to a record for the first time as something clear and tangible - what is retained in the memory is the atmosphere and the emotions that the music evokes, but not much else. Atol Drone (Polycephal 2002) was an altogether different case. It broke through into my mind surreptitiously like a high Pacific wave and for years it held sway over the area of my musical memory responsible for the rough sea, atomic fears, sea fever, incomplete Morse signals no…
Inanimate Nature
the first title in yasunori saito’s exhaustive survey of the music of masayuki takayanagi via his jinya disc imprint... the arrival of these discs in the mms catalogue has been a long time in the making; extremely glad to have these seminal documents of free-scrape/noise-guitar crossover in stock !!!this disc features takayanagi on solo “tabletop guitar” as recorded “aug 4, 1990 at ‘new direction for the arts, regular concert vol.69’ jean jean tokyo” - nothing at all like fred frith, keith rowe,…
Under Milk Wood
The new LSD March album Under Milk Wood is their first full length since 2007's Constellation Of Tragedy for Important Records. With grace (in the rock sense), style, humor & the perfect touch of heavy riffage this tremendously unique and original recording is a classic of the new Japanese underground. Recorded at Black Snowflake Studios in Japan, Under Milk Wood is a fascinating ghostly rock album full of clean untreated restraint and a grounded calm compliments of Takahashi Ikuro's drumming. I…
Kippschwingungen
In 2007, Frank Bretschneider was invited to compose music for the Subharchord, a unique electronic instrument developed during the 1960’s at the RFZ, the technical center for radio and television of the East German postal service. Built in a limited edition of eight machines total, only three Subharcords (in Vienna, Trondheim and Berlin) are believed to survive to this day. The Subharchord is, broadly defined, a subharmonic sound generator, comparable soundwise to the Mixturtrautonium. It’s sugg…
Crwth (Chorus Redux)
Through their use of low tech means and focusing on the blending of guitar noise and electronic voice processing, Lovesliescrushing can be seen as the early 'missing link' between the likes of Slowdive and Fennesz. Their output has been consistently and beautifully crafted... works that contain an element of sonic mystery and still sound timeless. Lovesliescrushing is an important, if perhaps overlooked, point in the timeline of contemporary electronic music. - Richard Chartier. Loveslies…
Stockholm, Berlin 1966
Hard to believe that this far down the line there would still be unreleased recordings of Albert Ayler, never mind a full live set from the apex of his reign, the glorious 1966 tour of Europe, so I nearly did a double take when I first saw this title listed. The Berlin set which the CD is bundled with turned up in lesser fidelity and in the incorrect order on Revenant’s disputed Ayler box, but the Stockholm set has never even been booted and both receive their first release fully authorised by t…
La journée de l\'existence
“Ivan Wyschnegradsky (1893-1979). "The Day of Existence". Confession of life before life. For orchestra and narrator. Text and music by Ivan Wyschnegradsky. With Mario Haniotis (speaker), Nouvel Orchestre Philharmonique de Radio-France under the direction of Alexandre Myrat. "Ivan Wyschnegradsky had to wait sixty years to hear the first performance of his masterwork, La Journée de l'Existence, which he had conceived and composed beginning in 1916 in Saint Petersburg. And we have had to wait anot…
Map in hand
Seaworthy, a three piece collective based in Sydney, Australia that revolves around core member Cameron Webb as well as Sam Shinazzi and Greg Bird, was formed in early 2000 to explore melodic and experimental approaches to the construction of minimalist sound scapes from looped guitar, warm drones, piano, electronics and field recordings.Map In Hand often blurs the lines of conventional categorisation with elements traditionally considered part of “indie” or “post” rock blended with processed mu…
A winter's night at the crooked forest
Kari Rønnekleiv, violin. Ole-Henrik Moe, viola. In 2011 Rønnekleiv/Moe released the album “A summer’s night at the crooked forest” on SOFA. The London based music magazine WIRE wrote that the album is a technical tour de force. And a musical one, too, each track structured with composerly precision. On this sequel we meet an extraordinary duo with an almost telepatic interplay. Recorded in the middle of the forest in a cabin with no electricity (the recording equipment was run on solar en…
Lost wisdom
The music of Mount Eerie has taken many forms (see: The Microphones) but it is always made by Phil Elverum. Lost Wisdom is an album that finds Elverum in a more collaborative mode than usual, working with two legends of music and kindred spirits, Julie Doiron and Fred Squire. Elverum and Doiron share vocal duties almost equally on the record, making it an album comprised of dark pop duets.This time the songs were recorded quickly and quietly during a surprise visit by Julie Doiron, keeper of t…
Castings
The title of Fern Knight’s 2006 release, Music for Witches and Alchemists, served simultaneously as a wonderfully apt description and an unambiguous product warning. If you prefer the mundane to the magical, move on: These are not the druids you’re looking for. Since then, the group has relocated to Arlington from Philadelphia, and while Fern Knight’s music evokes far-away times and places, it turns out the band fits in nicely with the D.C. area’s musical history—assuming you can stomach …
Silent City
Features Will Oldham (Bonnie Prince Billy) on vocals, and is a fascinating, compelling collaboration that mixes the last three centuries into one beautifully haunting, cryptic flow of idea-sound. Presented in a quietly handsome paper folio package!
Book of Beyond
"Ben Reynolds is one of the newer voices from the same UK scene that includes Ashtray Navigations and many of the VHF celebrities (Sunroof!, Vibracathedral Orchestra, Richard Youngs, etc.) It should be of little surprise then that Book of Beyond fits very nicely among the recordings of those other artists -- noise/junk drone. As in his previous recordings, this at times dissolves into more acoustic offerings, but the Fahey influence appears to be mostly gone, and what remains in the quie…
Chantal
An inedite work by the great composer Luc Ferrari: 'chantal, ou le portrait d'une villageoise' 1977-1978. Stereo magnetic tape. Mastering: Jérôme Joy, Meriol Lehmann-Avatar.
Sound Is
"Sound Is, is delightfully not what I had expected when this fine disc arrived, a beautiful soundscape, awash with more layerings and hypnotic cinematic virtues than I would ever hope to find. Though while saying that, I would be remiss if I didn’t mention the ultra fine hazy jazz that both effortlessly, and rambunctiously flows through this release, and stands not starkly in juxtaposition to the soundscape, but gives it the vibrant life necessary to keep you quietly swinging at 4 in the mornin…
Black Box: Torture Garden/Leng Tch\'e
"The controversial and influential Naked City Black Box couples two of Zorn's most extreme and violent creations. Torture Garden (1991) presents Naked City's intense and groundbreaking music combining free jazz, bebop, r&b, country, funk, rockabilly, surf, metal and grindcore—usually in the same song! The rare, seldom heard Leng Tch'e (1992), released only in Japan and long out-of-print features Naked City in an agonizingly slow, brutal 32-minute assault. This special 20th anniversary ed…
Große Gartenbauausstellung
Sven-Ake Johansson, Andrea Neumann and Axel Dörner formed the trio Barcelona Series in the end of the 90's. Their music was utterly important for the development of the new improscene, the new ways of improvising by using your instruments more as acoustic bodies than traditional instruments. Johansson had since the 70's been experimenting with a music with less gestures but anyhow keeping the emotional pressure. Both Dörner and Neumann were pioneers in their ways of playing their instrume…
The Full Use Of Nothing
Awesome reissue! Here sensitively remastered by Denis Blackham from the original master tapes at Skye Mastering and with a beautiful facsimile mini LP style sleeve, made in Japan.The Full Use Of Nothing was the first serious publication of music by Andrew Chalk/Ferial Confine on cassette in 1985. Early experimentation in acoustic percussion and primitive multi-tracking techniques shaped the sound and spirit of these formative recordings, somehow very tentative but leading to an on-going …
A Bureaucratic Desire for Extra-Capsular Extraction
A Bureaucratic Desire for Extra-Capsular Extraction gathers all of the music drone metal progenitors Earth recorded in October 1990, during their earliest sessions at Portland's Smegma Studios. Earth, featuring soon-to-be Melvin Joe Preston in its second lineup, intended for those seven tracks to serve as its debut. Record label decisions interfered. Three of those tracks were released a year later via Sub Pop, on the out-of-print EP Extra-Capsular Extraction; four more were released…