New Arrivals
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…
The Dusted Sessions
"Date Palms revolve around the core duo of Gregg Kowalsky (keyboards, electronics) and Marielle Jakobsons (violin, flute, electronics). They employ traditional rock instrumentation to create music informed by Indian classical music, country, minimalism, and spiritual jazz, arriving at a style that is wholly their own. On their third album, The Dusted Sessions, the duo expanded the line-up to include Ben Bracken on electric bass, Michael Elrod on tanpura, and Noah Philips on electric guitar…
Virgins
Virgins was recorded during three periods in 2012, mostly in Reykjavik, Montreal and Seattle, using ensembles in live performance. The sound palette of this work is wider, almost 'percussive' and tighter sounding than previous works. While this album remains committed to a painterly form of musical abstraction, it is also a record of restrained composition recorded live primarily in intimate studio rooms. This record employs woodwinds, piano and synthesizers towards an effort at doing what digit…
Alcor
restocked!! Alcor is the debut LP by a new voice from the Australian wilderness. Hailing from Ferntree Gully, Victoria, the music of Astor has thus far been appreciated only via a string of barely-distributed CDRs. Alcor gathers together the prime of these micro-editions and presents the material as a seductive and puzzling new whole. Field recordings of humble organic activity bend against a foundation of discreetly processed electronics/piano, creating sonorities that are as undefinable a…
Lemuria
The hidden meanings are those that are at the origin of things. In an interview to Blow Up magazine in 2010, Venetian sound artist Enrico Coniglio, commenting on his aesthetic approach to the soundscape (it is the result of the aggregation of clusters of elements that have reason for existence in relation to their own specific function), marked off the traces for a path that some time later would take him to collaborate with the photographer and field recordist Giovanni Lami, from Ravenna, in …
Dance of the vampires
"Roman Polanski’s 1967 film ‘Dance Of The Vampires’ (as it was originally called, but more widely known by its re-named title ‘The Fearless Vampire Killers’, or ‘Pardon Me, But Your Teeth Are In My Neck’) is a camp horror cult classic. At the time the film was marketed as a ‘farce’, which overlooked the fact that this film is fantastically eerie. The major part played by the soundtrack in giving the film this effect cannot be understated, and the cold-as-snow production did much to enhance the b…
Rehearsal tapes and alt. Takes NYC 1976-1978
"Connie Burg and I met Sumner Crane and Nancy Arlen in late 1975 and quickly decided to start a band. Sumner had been playing piano since he was a kid and I trumpet, guitar and more recently bass, but we were for the most part self taught. Connie decided to pick up a guitar and we started jamming in Nancy’s loft on Broadway and Duane St. where Sumner lived downstairs. For the first few months it was just piano, bass and acoustic guitar, with some paper bag percussion from Nancy. Our biggest rock…
Oiseaux-Tempete
Oiseaux-Tempête debut album retraces, in a sonic odyssey, the qualms and queries of a sickly and dysfunctional Western society. Experimental, Stoner, Post-Rock, Ambient, Free Music. The trio was created in Paris in 2012 by the musically versatile pair Frédéric D. Oberland (guitar) and Stéphane Pigneul (bass) (members of FareWell Poetry and Le Réveil des Tropiques) and percussionist Ben Mc Connell (drummer for bands such as Beach House, Rain Machine, Au Revoir Simone, Marissa Nadler and Winter Fa…
Under A Single Banner
It's been a busy couple of years for the producer behind the Shifted project. On top of an extremely well-received album for the Mote Evolver label, the producer has edged further out into the fringes of electronic music under a number of aliases, taking in noise/ambient variants as Covered In Sand, as well as more distorted, technofied productions under the Alexander Lewis moniker, a sound described by the Blackest Ever Black label as "S-M techno." His new album as Shifted, Under a Single Ba…
I am here where are you
After the great 2012 record by Brötzmann / Noble / Edwards, the worse the better, Peter Brötzmann and Steve Noble started to play some gigs as a duo. It worked out really well, wonderful pieces of music that had to be put on cd; an expert, you might even say telepathic, interplay between those two outstanding musicians, sometimes delicate and swinging, sometimes full-force free jazz.
Message From Era Ora
One of the most original and innovative Krautrock bands, Embryo fused traditional ethnic music with their own jazzy space rock style. Over their 40-year existence, during which Christian Burchard has been the only consistent member, the group has traveled the world, playing with hundreds of different musicians and releasing over 20 records. This is a never before released jams recorded live during 1976 in various locations. This is the only record of the collaboration with the italian jazz legen…
Ship Chop
Ship Chop is a celebratory cut-up of far-flung musics. Edited, collaged and re-arranged by Daniel Padden from original vinyl sources to create impossible collaborations between musical ghosts. It is both reverential and sacrilegious, giving the music its full praise whilst also subjecting it to playful subversion. Some of the editing is obvious and transparent, but some of it much less so, where sounds from different recordings and continents overlap into an unlikely whole.
Daniel Padden …
Mother of Thousands
As with their previous 'proper' full-length Gettin' Gone, new album Drone Trailer finds Matt Valentine and Erika Elder Still hooked up with The Golden Road, and ready to spurt forth blistering passages of galvanized psych-rock at a moment's notice: after a scorching pile-up of vintage guitar muck, opener 'Anyway' draws to an ill-behaved conclusion with some improv guitar and free-noise skronk, all completely undermined by a jazzy line in tremolo rhodes piano tinkering. Despite such flight…
Alpha Recordings
*Another precious find from Andy Votel and Demdike Stare\'s Dead-Cert imprint featuring foundational Concrète experiments from the director of IPEM, Belgium\'s equivalent of the Radiophonic Workshop. Transferred from the original Mastertapes by Andrew Popplewell and remastered by Gareth Mallinson and Matt Colton, limited Edition pressing of 500 copies* Dead Cert illuminate three unique and chilling electro-acoustic compositions by the pioneering head of Belgium\'s Institute of Psychoacoustic and…
Cover Versions
Andrew Pekler selected 300 different covers from second-hand records and, using colorful geometric elements to cover over all titles, performer’s names, and label logos, removed traces of the covers’ original contexts. The sunsets, couples in silhouette, alpine panoramas, roses on pianos, female faces in close-up, and seascapes no longer serve as the packaging for easy listening and exotica. Instead, the romantic, bizarre and intriguingly bland images of the original covers are free to lend thei…
Brombron 26: Two lost souls
Korm Plastics is proud to present the twenty-sixth release in the Brombron series (missing numbers will follow later this year). Originally a co-production between Staalplaat and Extrapool, it is now hosted by co-curator Frans de Waard. In the year 2000 Frans de Waard and Extrapool started the Brombron project. Two or more musicians become artists in residence in Extrapool, an arts initiative in Nijmegen, The Netherlands, with a fully equipped sound recording studio. These artists can work in a …
French Antarctica
probably the most anticipated record of the year for this household. the clip below has been on repeat for a couple months. Kye is proud to present 'French Antarctica', the debut LP by Good Area. Drawing from a palette of guitar, rhythm box, cornet, shortwave radio and room activity Good Area have crafted the ultimate stand-alone testament to instantaneous expression. Bypassing such obsolete concepts as dexterity and restraint 'French Antarctica' cuts loose with a raw unbridled rush of creative …
Schizophrenia Party (Director's Cut)
Reissued on vinyl for the first time, in a strictly limited-edition of 500 copies. Comes with four exclusive bonus tracks. Schizophrenia Party (Director's Cut) represents the second chapter in the career of UK underground heroes Family Fodder after their legendary debut Monkey Banana Kitchen. This full-length album features the complete 12" EP Schizophrenia Party (including the nine-minute monster tune "Dinosaur Sex") from 1981 and the 7" singles Film Music (1981) and The Big Dig(1982), all orig…
Inconsistent Images
Inconsistent Images includes three works of musique concrète composed in 2012. The title is derived from an observation of inconsistencies in stereo image, but also describes the destabilisation of certain media, utilised for their musical properties, and at the same time suggesting a pseudo-visual response.”
Adam Asnan is a London based composer-performer of musique concrète, acquiring an MA under the supervision of Denis Smalley in 2009. Adam’s work promotes the aesthetic potential of f…
Live in LSO St. Luke's, London
Iancu Dumitrescu 'Extreme point of gravity' (2009) for ensemble (Hyperion & Talea Ensemble). 'Le silence d'or (V)' (2009) for ensemble and computer sounds. Ana-Maria Avram 'Telesma (X)' for three percussion groups and computer sounds (G. Aguilar, P. Teodorescu, A. Lipovsky). 'Textures (III) / Penumbra' for two bass clarinets (Rane Moore and Tim Hodgkinson) and ensemble (Hyperion & Talea Ensemble).