New Arrivals
The black symphony
The new solo work by inventive French soundartist is the true symphony, divided into several parts titled like 'Adagio', 'Allegro', 'Menuet', etc. but without any hints to traditional instruments or classical orchestration - just the pure white noise structures.A mediactivist, artist-researcher, composer / musician, poet and tongues destroyer, experimental film maker and anarchitect, founder and member of Apo33, Julien Ottavi is involved in research and creative work, combining sound art, re…
The Sandman's Garden - A Film By Arthur Sloss Crenshaw
Captivating 66-minute documentary following autodidactic African-American outsider artist, Lonnie Holley - whose 'Just Before Music' album was one of our faves of 2012 - as he prepared his biggest exhibit to date in 2004 in the sculpture garden at Birmingham Museum of Art, Alabama. "The film follows Holley as he builds a sculptural environment out of discarded materials and found objects in the Birmingham Museum of Art’s sculpture garden. His art is by turns profound, playful, and deeply moving.…
Avast!
Avast! was created from field recordings made between 2009 and 2012 in Lyttelton, a volcanic harbour on the South Island of New Zealand. Sounds were captured at sites around the natural ampthitheatre of this extinct caldera: from abandoned wartime bunkers on the top of the crater rim to the port and its cacophony of cargo ships, tugs and workshops. The work is also haunted by the resonance of buildings such as the Timeball Station, which were destroyed when the town was at the epicentre of a maj…
Coin coin chapter two: Mississippi Moonchile
Mississippi Moonchile is the much-anticipated new installment of Matana Roberts' unique and forward-looking project and it finds Roberts conjuring some of the most nuanced, thoughtful and substantial American liberation music of the 21st century. Mississippi Moonchile was developed for an intimately woven New York jazz sextet and represents the next leap forward in Roberts' iconoclastic and complex project of memory and recuperation, where historical and contemporary musical tropes, fragmentary …
Re-Engineering
Steven Warwick aka Heatsick cocks a unique and compelling perspective on contemporary dance music with his bold follow-up to 'Intersex', a gorgeous, layered work that those of you into DJ Sprinkles should check out without delay. Now woven with leaner dancefloor muscle, the deeply funked views of 'Re-Engineering' are characterised by the artist as a "cybernetic poem". We can take this quite literally in his use of spoken word in pieces such as 'Re-Engineering' with its Chris Morris-esque wordpla…
Sequitur
Emeralds co-pilot Steve Hauschildt follows up his 'Tragedy & Geometry' album for Kranky with the plush new age disco dreamscapes of 'Sequitur'. Arguably, Steve is the lazy one in Emeralds, conjuring only three solo album to date compared with the gazillion respective works from bandmates John Elliot and Mark McGuire. But, as evidenced here and previously, he's also the canniest and most pop-wise, honing a more concise, richly rhythmic and melodic style of composition still rooted in cereb…
Dream Seeds
Extra Life’s first record for Northern Spy, Dream Seeds marks a dramatically new creative direction in the band’s still-young but prolific career. It is perhaps Extra Life’s most clearly-defined concept album : seven songs dealing entirely with the twin themes of dreams and children. In a lyrical left turn away from the morbid sexuality and black humor of Made Flesh, these songs look to the subconscious in search of innocence, morality and meaning. According to principal songwriter and e…
Nine Months To The Disco
The most impressive, but also the most overlooked of all the bands that lurched around the mutant extremes that trail through Gang of Four, the Mekons, and, ultimately, the Pop Group, the Glaxo Babies' debut album was actually cut following the collapse of the original band -- both vocalist/songwriter Rob Chapman and drummer Geoff Alsopp had departed, with saxophonist Tony Wrafter explaining the reason for the rift. "Rob was into songs and we weren't." Too true! Under Chapman's aegis, Glaxo Babi…
Radiator
Beautiful new work from Kevin Doria (Growing). If Eliane Radigue and Kevin Drumm made a record together it might sound something like Total Life. Kevin Doria creates a sound world with deep inner dynamics shrouded by distortion. Whether you stay on the surface or listen deeply, the energy in this work is vivid.
"Fortunately, Kevin Doria is back and his new album is devestating." Ad Hoc.
Recorded and mixed at home in the winter of 2012, RADIATOR represents the first proper full length release by…
Three-Lane Blacktop
"Limited to 300 copies LP that bundles a bunch of great performances from the first Charalambides trio line-up featuring Tom and Christina Carter alongside Jason Bill (later of Migrantes). Two full sets that catch the group breaking out from their early Texas-psych sound into a whole new free/folk mutant, with Christina’s jubilant, spooked vocals over rattlesnake guitar and a wash of F/X. Still one of the most important – if relatively unsung – underground rock groups of the past decade p…
Miscellany Deluxe
Finally arrived : Much of the music included in this set is exclusive to this vinyl version of ‘Miscellany’. Andrew Liles has compiled a comprehensive anthology including as much varied, interesting and unreleased material as possible. He spent many an afternoon sifting through piles of cassettes seeking the oldest and arguably most definitive pieces of music from literally hundreds of hours of tape.The earliest recordings on these discs date back to 1984. ‘Find a New Husband’ was made on Liles'…
El Pianista del Antifaz
LP version with CD. French-Catalan musician Pascal Comelade's world is atypical and his inspirations come from many different sources -- from contemporary music to The Cramps -- making him one of the most creative and original artists of our times. At the crossroads of many different arts, never where he's expected, he never ceases to surprise his audience, taking the listener on poetic paths of primitive perception. El Pianista del Antifaz is the latest album in Comelade's galaxy. The artwor…
Remember your black day
“Remember Your Black Day” features the first material conceived and produced as a full length by Dominick Fernow for the Vatican Shadow project following almost a dozen tapes (mostly released on Hospital Productions) and vinyl editions (released by the likes of Blackest Ever Black, Modern Love and Type) over the last three years. None of the 8 tracks included have been released before on any other format. At a time when the scene is saturated with “Noise Techno” the album is almost celebratory b…
Surveillance
Painted Caves is Evan Caminiti. Surveillance is his debut LP under this alias. Primarily sourced from modular synthesizer, Surveillance compiles 7 tracks recorded over the last year, warped with cassette tapes and other digital tools. Beamed in like a scene from Videodrome, this sensual brand of dystopian psychedelia creates a grainy and tension filled narrative to get lost in. Much of Caminiti’s past work has inhabited a world of it’s own, but Surveillance is a direct response to life in an …
Piano solo
Recorded live at Cafe OTO in March 2009 during Otomo Yoshihide's first residency here. This was one of only a handful of solo piano performances Otomo has given where he uses the instrument as a control matrix for harmonically rich feedback tones and devastating clusters of complex noise. Beautifully rendered with maximum dynamic range by Lupo's 45rpm cut!
Split
Debut vinyl release for both of these great artists who collectively have had releases on a host of excellent underground labels such as Stunned Records, Housecraft, Sturmundrugs Records and Digitalis. Black Eagle Child is the musical project of Michael Jantz, and this release is his second outing for Blackest Rainbow following his excellent Kite Excursions CDR a while back. Here he presents us with 4 tracks of skillful guitar finger picking layered with glockenspeil, accordian and some perfectl…
Tender Exploration
“Tender Exploration” reminds me of Hayao Miyazaki’s “Howl’s Moving Castle”, it’s an enormous metallic machine on spindly legs, walking like a toddler, but also steaming, mumbling, panting, a creature full of energy, and inhabited by a fire demon. “Drake”, the first track”, starts seeking for a structure almost clumsily, the band members seem to have to find each other. But soon they have a good chemistry and Bauer, who dominates this piece in spite of its name, adds his huge repertoire of tech…
African Songbird
Matsuli Music is proud is announce the re-issue of African Songbird, the masterpiece from South Africa's greatest jazz singer, Sathima Bea Benjamin. Originally released in 1976, African Songbird was a debut long overdue. The splendid vinyl reissue of African Songbird opens with a cavernous, spacious, enormous sound, Bea Benjamin’s voice is introduced by Dollar Brand’s plangent, lingering electric keyboards before the ensemble joins in like rolling thunder. The vibrant plucked bass (provided b…
Ornate shroud
Hopefully MRTYU requires little introduction, because the project evades easy description. An odd compound of vedic imagery, metal misanthropy, and violin agony, this music moves away from any particular fan base in pursuit of its distant, darkened idols. Ornate shroud is MRTYU's most potent spawn to date. Hewing closer to song form than previous releases, the album conceals Antony Milton's violent guitar and violin work behind MRTYU's characteristic murk. Its pieces transition from jagged riffs…
Antworten
180 gram LP version with free download code. "Antworten (meaning: answer) is the third installment in a trilogy of Qluster music, following on from the Fragen (BB 076CD/LP) (meaning: question) and Rufen (BB 075CD/LP) (meaning: call) studio albums. The fact that the music on Antworten was created before Rufen and Fragen were recorded is less of a paradox than it might at first appear. For the expansive piano fantasies of their 2007 recordings had already provided a clear answer to the two musicia…