New Arrivals
Summing
Oscar Jan Hoogland is the sound of Amsterdam in person. He plays in the Muziekgebouw (Amsterdams main hall for modern composed music) as well as in the Bimhuis (Holland’s main jazz venue) that is literally attached to it, as in its parking garage. He is an instant composer, pianist and inventor of his own instrument by putting a clavichord, a keyboard instrument from the 17th century, on 220 Volt electricity.
As the last student of the late pianist, composer and improvisor Misha Mengelberg he te…
Eric Random & Free Agents
The Free Agents was originally a side-project of The Tiller Boys. These were a Manchester group active from 1978 to 1979. They supported Joy Division on a few occasions. They recorded a single for Factory, which the label did not release in the end. Later, the single was released on New Hormones after the group disbanded. The Boys consisted of Eric Random, Francis Cookson and Pete Shelley.
When Free Agents was founded, an LP was released entitled £3.33 in 1980 on Groovy Records. This album later…
An Abandoned Laboratory Vol. III
Edward Ka-Spel is an English singer/songwriter and musician residing in Nijmegen, The Netherlands. He is best known for his work with the band The Legendary Pink Dots, which he co-founded. He is also known for his work on The Tear Garden with Skinny Puppy's cEvin Key. In 2017, he collaborated with Amanda Palmer on the album I Can Spin a Rainbow.
In The Dots, he was initially known as D'Archangel, Prophet Q'Sepel and he used other pseudonyms as well. He has also released numerous solo albums (ini…
Kleine Krieg
The Legendary Pink Dots are an Anglo-Dutch experimental rock band formed in London in August 1980. In 1984 the band moved to Amsterdam, playing with rotating musicians and having, as core members, singer/songwriter/keyboardist Edward Ka-Spel and keyboardist Phil Knight aka The Silverman. The band was originally called "One Day..." but subsequently changed the name to The Legendary Pink Dots, apparently inspired by pink dots on certain keys of the band's main recording studio piano. In the 1980s …
Yes Yes No No Yes No Yes
Officer! was founded by Londoner Mick Hobbs. His roots were in the Rock In Opposition scene of the late 70s and early 80s. Initially he worked as guitarist in The Work, subsequently he became closely associated with This Heat and their Cold Storage Studio in Brixton, working with artists like FamilyFodder, Catherine Jauniaux or Zeena Parkins.
The band's first album "8 New Songs By Mick Hobbs" came out in 1982 on casette only. It was followed by the second album, "Ossification". The third album, …
S.O.T.A.
*Limited edition of 100 hand-numbered copies, issued in a digipack.* Non Toxique Lost are one of the most important and equally most underrated bands from Berlin's 1980s Industrlal scene. Sprung aus den Wolken, Einstürzende Neubauten, Die Tödliche Doris and also Non Toxique Lost were the core of the movement in the divided city. In the old days, most of their albums came out on cassette only, later they were collected onto vinyls and CDs.
After the tragic loss of long-time member Steffen Schütze…
Khamu (She Sleep Walks)
Second installment in a reissue programme for this excellent UK band. C Cat Trance were formed by multi instrumentalist John Rees Lewis after his departure from Medium Medium, taking the band's drummer Nigel Kingston Stone with him. The band are seen as members of the post-punk movement, but that's not all that is to say about their sound.
C Cat Trance incorporated ethnic music into their compositions before world music became a popular genre. Their influences come mainly from Northern Africa an…
Eyeful
The Residents are an American art collective best known for their over 60 studio albums that were recorded over a period of over forty years. They also created some outstanding multimedia works, mainly three CD ROM projects and ten DVDs. Working as an anonymous collective, their identitites were kept secret until in 2017 Hardy Fox revealed himself as their primary composer. Hardy died in October 2018, but the group continue to record and perform.
Recently, several new albums have been released, …
Crossfade Estate
Crossfade Estate was a special, distinct project. It was made in November 2005. Recorded in 10 hours. Edited, mixed and collaged over 18 months. It was a development of Charles Hayward's long term relationship with The Albany in Deptford, London. They asked him to push their recently installed digital recording suite and see what he could make. The approach was a step further from the series Accidents+Emergencies which Hayward had curated in the late 1990's.
It was a pulling together of differen…
Antiphonen
Sainkho Namtchylak is a singer originally from Tuva, an autonomous republic in the Russian Federation just north of Mongolia. She is known for her Tuvan throat singing or Khöömei. Her music encompasses avant-jazz, electronica, modern composition and Tuvan influences. Once the Soviet Union had collapsed, she moved to Vienna, making it her base, although she traveled widely, working in any number of shifting groups and recording a number of discs that revolved around free improvisation. Amongst th…
Rock Sutra
Sun Araw released Rock Sutra, via Sun Ark, his Drag City sub-label. Cameron Stallones' latest LP consists of four long tracks. "The music is offered in a spirit of generosity and adventure," he says, "It doesn't stay put, and it keeps zooming in to reveal more and more. This is so you can zoom in and experience 'feeling-without-articulating' for yourself, which is better than reading about it here."
Rock Sutra is the first album Stallones recorded live-to-MIDI with his band, which consists of Jo…
Oneiric Formulary
Master of myriad styles, Sir Rick Bishop takes in baroque, flamenco, surf, and harder to place fusions of phantasmagoric sound design, Gaelic folk and Indian Raga, and more lysergic expression in this bounty of a new album.
Five years after Tangier Sessions, Sir Richard Bishop, we presume, is back from his travels around the world. With Oneiric Formulary, he’s dug deeper into his bag of extra-musical gestures from the eternal and unknowable, along with a few sounds we might recognize, all transm…
Raum 318
Asmus Tietchens is a sound artist and composer from Hamburg, Germany. He got interested in Musique Concrete by listening to a German radio program when he was 10 years old. In 1965, at the age of 18, Asmus started experimenting with tape loops and turned them into musical collages. Soon, the use of synthesizers was added. In 1980 his debut album Nachtstücke was released, produced by Peter Baumann of Tangerine Dream. This was soon followed by a series of albums of electronic pop music for the Sky…
Jazzblazzt
Rodrigo Amado was born in Lisbon, Portugal, in 1964 and took up the saxophone at the age of 17 while convalescing from an accident. Later he studied at the Hot Club Music School and was soon playing with numerous rock, pop and experimental projects. At the shifting boundary between free jazz and improvised music, Amado's position is clear: he plays jazz. He is so clearly a jazz musician that he doesn't require any pre-determined elements of rhythm, harmony, chorus lengths or melody to play jazz.…
Gene-P Rejected
Edition of 50 numbered copies in a fold-out cover. When Menstrual recordings produced the fourth edition of Gene-P in 2019 there was a mix up with the audio files. All the discs had to be repressed. Now is available for sale a collector edition limited only to 50 copies of the "Rejected Version" with new artwork.
Originally released as a private cassette in 1980. Cover image is 1980 arwork by M.B.
Das Testament
Amazing remix album by the Czech Opening Performance Orchestra. Opening Performance Orchestra using the very noisy Das Testament from 1983 by M.B. are able to make an even more abrasive and challenging work than the original. Possibly one of the best M.B. remix album we have listened to in a long time. Very Recommended! Edition of 200 copies in digipack with 8 pages booklet with text in Italian, Czech and English.
Simphonie In X Major
Edition of 300 copies in digipack. Re-issue of noise classic Simphonie in X Major (1989) plus Simphonie in O Minor (1991).Quoting audion magazine' The New Blockaders certainly make one hell of a racket. Simphonie In X Major makes Whitehouse sound like minimal art! 'TNB are in a world of their own and always have been. Ripped out of the grooves and positively bleeding out of the speakers Simphonie In X Major takes Stockhausen's baby and abuses it cruelly. Once the bloody and battered carcass has…
Nothing but the Music
The sounds of late '70s and '80s east coast avant-garde jazz, soul, and punk rock are well documented, but in Nothing but the Music Thulani Davis gives us something beyond, delivering a collection of synesthetic, transportive documentary poems that breathe anecdotal and impressionistic life into a sonic-social history about which most can only speculate. Davis' verse takes free flight with its muses, scatting and leaping off the page and the shoulders of the musicians, nightclubs, and choreograp…
Selected Writings and Interviews
The life and work of Maryanne Amacher are as vast as they are as yet unknown. A heterodox and idiosyncratic selection of largely unpublished documents spanning the bandwidth of the still unprocessed contents of the Amacher archive.
The Plastic Cow Goes Moooooog
"With sound engineer and synth wizard Bernie Krause and Paul Beaver on board, this record falls easily in the realm of space-age pop. Originally released in 1970 on Dot Records and distributed by Paramount Pictures, the album would have been a dj tool favorite for quite a while, thanks to some heavy breaks and proto-electro loops. Featuring amazing rendition of pop-rock classics such as Born To Be Wild, Sunshine of Your Love, Lay Lady Lay and The Ballad of John and Yoko, this is a truly welcomed…