New Arrivals
Metz
Some will find it hard to believe that a glamrock band with a gritty urban veneer came from Texas and stuck together long enough to release this milestone record. Indeed, I was startled to learn that they're from Texas and not NYC or London. Clearly the underground music scene throughout Texas is fertile with talent and enough socio-cultural diversity to support any genre, including mid-70s glamrock. Metz take on glam includes some of the associated clichés like heavy chunks of chord strokes and…
Guts
Deluxe 2LP version. More voraciously bestial soundwork coming from Daniel Menche -- this time, his chosen theme is the piano, in which he attacks, investigates and dissects with the precision of an autopsy surgeon, adding a whole new meaning to the concept of prepared piano, or should we say, unprepared piano, for an all-out assault. Guts lays out quite possibly some of the finest slabs of Menchian sonic mayhem to date. Slightly different track sequence over CD and vinyl formats due to time…
Broken iteration
The Japanese percussion player who lives in Europe has three fields of interest: 1, non-idiomatic improvisation (that includes idiomatic researches about it, or workshops on it). 2, electro acoustic composition. 3, plural disciplinary collaboration (with words, images, body movements etc) and it would seem to me that these four pieces here are a combination of 1 and 2. [] Murayama's playing is very minimal and we do recognize indeed the element of percussion instruments, and Murayama explores hi…
Homage To The Pointed Waveforms
Few copies available, sold out at source - Homage To The Pointed Waveforms is the final release in a series dedicated to specific sound waves. Following Square (2008) and Sine (2009), ...Pointed Waveforms explores composition with triangle and sawtooth waves through studies of a dense modular system. Variations were performed live in Barcelona, Brussels and Madrid during spring 2011, but this LP is the next step. Side A contains a version of the piece that was conceived for the shows, whi…
Les archives de l'univers amnesique illustre
Coloured white vinyl in a run of 250 copies with inserts by each artist. A new pairing of minds and techniques on a steel-grey voyage across the treacherous Ifingr river. Kiyoharu Kuwayama, master of resonant spaces and junk objects holds the reins over three chapters of spiralling horror and madness. Sounds are coaxed out ashamed and blushing: the syphilitic cough, the cracked shin bone and the greasy sheen of night sweats wired up to a 9 volt battery. Wataru Kasahara plays the mysterious maske…
Chimerizations
Chimerizations feature a radically new form of documentation of Florian Hecker’s sound works that dramatize the phenomenon of Auditory Chimaeras.
“Chimeras are integrated bodies that synthesize incompatible modalities, surpassing their respective particularities without fusing them, finding a common ground, or reducing one to the other.” (Robin Mackay)
The publication presents the documentation of Hecker’s recent sound pieces (“Magnitude Estimation,” 2010; “Hecker Leckey Sound Voice Chimera,” 20…
Paranoid Cat
Paranoid Cat is Philadelphia guitarist Chris Forsyth's third solo album and first for Family Vineyard -- a sprawling, harmonically-charged side-long suite backed by a clutch of compositions merging raw and delicate American roots traditions. After more than a decade trotting the globe and recording with a mess of today's avant garde greats, plus co-leading the brazenly absurd Peeesseye, Forsyth has arranged a full-band to accompany his electric six-string vision of interlocking arpeggios and max…
The Stargate Tapes
"Sharing social circles and spiritual ideologies with artists such as Iasos, Connie Demby and Deuter, whilst splitting label release schedules with Laraaji, Laurie Spiegel and Wendy Carlos, the unique Florida raised soul mate duo known as Emerald Web released their privately pressed debut LP at an axis where post-prog rock met proto-new age and ambient electronic music. At the turn of the 1980s Bob Stohl and Kat Epple embarked on a ten-year spiritual journey playing at planetariums and laser sho…
Lonely women's club
Beautiful new work from Lawrence English. Pressed in an edition of 500 copies. Somewhere after dark, before dawn, in a place where natural light is shunned and organ is singing. It's voice is that of an arcing clouds of tone, emerging and falling with an uneasy sense of pace and direction. The voice warbles, a vibrato of shifting pulse and subtle variation. The room around it is filled with a dusty ash; smoke in haze like proportions. Eyes are blood shot, sunken below the rim of a glass. …
The Face of the Earth
The second beautiful album by the duo of Jessika Kenney -- a vocalist known for her haunting timbral sense, as well as her profound interpretation of Persian vocal traditions -- and Eyvind Kang -- a violist for whom the act of music and learning is a spiritual discipline. All tracks were composed by Kenney (voice, percussion, electronics) and Kang (viola, setar, electronics). "The Central Javanese Wangsalan is a kind of riddle (two lines, twelve syllables each, divided 4 and 8 ), sung by the…
Lava
"Lava is a wonderfully apt title for this duet between Liudas Mockunas on soprano, tenor and bass saxophones and Barry Guy on bass. The music was recorded live at Kaunas Artists House Concert Hall in Lithuania on the 2nd of April, 2011, and released in a limited edition run of 300 vinyl LP's. Lava is the appropriate name for this music as it flows slowly and inexorably forward. Guy is a rock solid bassist who is a stalwart on the avant jazz and classical scene in Europe, and his skills ar…
Fur Paul Klee
For Sven-Ake Johansson, the capricious and mercurial character of Paul Klee's texts is not a flaw, but a quality in its own right. His thirteen settings capture precisely this quality of the texts. Johansson's clear diction, his distinct, almost exaggerated elocution, imbues Klee s texts with a lapidary air without stripping them of their personal and intimate nature.
Vanilla Call Option
Packaged in a pro-press color jacket and a silkscreened pvc sleeve, Jeff Witscher, aka idiosyncratic electronic musician Rene Hell, presents a typically considered, challenging debut release via PAN. Those who've encountered his acclaimed albums for Type, or his NNA Tapes split with OPN, will hear a defined progress in 'Vanilla Call Option', whilst those new to his music should be prepared for a visceral, cerebral exploration of piercing timbres and sheer, hi-end computer sounds that in turn rec…
Helena Espvall and Masaki Batoh
Restocked, few available..."If the pentagrams and moccasins and ponchos of the now nearly bygone “freak folk” era made listening to Fairport Convention cool again, Helena Espvall and Masaki Batoh’s self-titled collaboration serves as a reminder that British longhairs of the ’60s were nerds, nerds, nerds. Cellist Espvall, best known for her work with Espers, and Batoh, the guitarist of Japanese psych band Ghost, deploy an arsenal of exotic stringed instruments. They play earnest cover…
Line the clouds
Multi-faceted composer and performer Ashley Paul releases her new lp 'line the clouds', on brooklyn's rel records. a hyper-intuitive record, where off-kilter instrumentation meets beautifully crafted melodies to convey the very essence of 'musicality', 'Line the clouds' contains 44.18 minutes of sonic paradoxes and dichotomies. Stirring up a zephyr of twelve blissfully cacophonous sounds - singular moments of an indivisible whole the focus is on guitar, voice and saxophone, but Ashley also em…
Live at the Cairo High Cinema Institute
I saw him at a street party in Giza where a few hundred people had amassed to dance and scream into the night. Flanked by Khaled Mando and Islam Tata, his two drummers pounding furiously asthe signature tone of his synth intensified for almost two hours, Islam Chipsy demonstrated his completely revolutionary take on modern Egyptian Shaabi. The sound was raw and distorted, thevolume was deafening, and the energy was high. Thirty minutes into the set, the trio pulled out blindfolds and put them on…
Quintet / Sextet
Otomo Yoshihide, guitar. Sachiko M, sine waves. Evan Parker, saxophones. John Edwards, double bass. Tony Marsh, drums. John Butcher, saxophones. The final night of Otomo and Sachiko's first residency in 2009 saw the pair joined by the long running trio of Evan Parker, John Edwards and Tony Marsh and special guest John Butcher. Butcher played duos with both Otomo and Sachiko (available as download only bonus tracks) and joined the quintet for a rousing sextet: stunning twin saxophone interplay, …
In Four Parts (Tribute To John Cage)
Equipped with a modular synthesizer, a guitar and electronics Patrick Pulsinger and Christian Fennesz approach the master of the treatment of silence, John Cage. The piece on this album, which was recorded live at Wiener Konzerthaus, was inspired by the underlying attitude of Cage’s String Quartet in Four Parts. Upon invitation by the WIEN MODERN festival the two legendary electronic music protagonists tackled the composer’s early string quartet, took it apart and adapted it for two players, alw…
Rave Slime
Limited edition 12" vinyl. Comes in a 140 micron polished finish PVC sleeve. Contains 2 locked grooves and a palindrome. 45 RPM. A double blow of brutalist composition and raw electronic music. Key words: extreme rave, radical synthesis, computer music for hooligans.
Noir
Jean-Marc Foussat (VCS 111, voice). Jean-François Pauvros (guitars). Makoto Sato (drums). They recorded this studio album a few years ago. Brillant and inspired, as always!