New Arrivals
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.
Along the way
Former Emeralds member Mark McGuire has planned a new album following his 2011 albumGet Lost. Along the Waythrough Dead Oceans. On Along The Way, McGuire writes in the liner notes, “This story is an odyssey through the vast, unknown regions of the mind…the endless unfolding of psychological landscapes, leading to perpetual discoveries and expansions, in a genuinely emergent and infinite world of worlds.” Further he writes “[the new album] is not a critique, it is not instructional, nor is it a p…
Real Sugar
"Ryan Garbes is the drummer of Iowa City bands such as Wet Hair, Dunebuggy, Trash Dog, and formerly Raccoo-oo-oon. His recordings under his own name represent a unique brand of solo multi-track recording with a seamless integrity; through a skillful use of instrumentation and recording technique, Garbes eschews notions of low fidelity for songs reminiscent of traditional American garage rock produced in the haze of an early '90s UK aesthetic. Genuine pop songs, cloaked in a comforting was…
The Four Seasons
"Noah Creshevsky composes some of the most meticulously constructed electronic music around. For his third Tzadik CD he has created a sonic history of his life work, inspired by the idea of a retrospective. The Four Seasons presents a new large-scale composition that reflects his work from 1992 on to his present work with Hyperrealism, creating virtual "super-performers" using the sounds of voices and traditional instruments pushed beyond human capacities. Another brilliant and varied program ch…
Echohaus
If you’ve heard of Felix Kubin before, you’ll likely think you have some idea of how ‘Echohaus’ is going to sound. Well forget what you know, you’re wrong – Kubin’s well-worn Sci-Fi pop stylings are entirely erased on ‘Echohaus’ as he rebuilds people’s preconceptions from the ground up. He may have just scored a long-deserved Wire cover, but Kubin is not content to simply rest on his laurels, and although ‘Echohaus’, a collaboration with contemporary chamber group Ensemble Integrales, migh…
Through A Pre-Memory
CD edition: Pan Sonic space explorer Mika Vainio and Sunn 0))) strongarm Stephen O'Malley rock our world to the foundations with this anticipated union of electronics and guitars recorded as ÄÄNIPÄÄ, featuring vocals by Alan Dubin (Khanate) and string arrangements from Eyvind Kang. In gestation for some years now, the results are little short of a modern doom masterpiece; a bracing exposition of cold, condensed, rage and stoic passion delivered like a slow, internally bruising hate-f**k t…
Kassidat: Raw 45s from Morocco
Kassidat: Raw 45s from Morocco is a full-length LP that features six extended tracks from the golden age of the Moroccan record industry. After Morocco gained its independence in 1956, Moroccan-owned record labels sprouted and flourished in Casablanca. The inexpensive 45 rpm format allowed the record companies to release thousands of songs during the 1960s, creating a snapshot of the raw and hypnotic Berber music that thrived throughout Morocco. Powerful traditional styles were still aliv…
Untitled (for Agnes Martin)
owen and allison met in brooklyn in 2009 with the intention to record 5 minute ‘songs’. deciding to work within this duration, they made several version’s of each improvisation based on a set of changing environments for new piece. allison’s instrument’s included field recordings (processed and un-processed), ring-modulated sinewaves + contact mic; owen’s instruments included a speaker + rose pedals, various oscillators, radio + fm transmitter and contact mic’ed surfaces + objects. the re…
Damballah 58
Damballah 58 is the monstrous sequel to 2012's deadly Black Mamba 12". The title-track's diabolically addictive vaudou rhythms insinuate deeply before uncoiling convulsively into an irrevocable reclamation of the consciousness. The B-side features "Mamba Muntu" (sister track to the previous "River Mumma" and "Witness the Spread of the Dream"), the treacherously beautiful "Belladonna Theme," and the marauding, burning rush of "Immersion." Written and produced by William Bennett. Original vév…
Orchestre Sidi Yassa De Kayes
After the 1960 independence, the Orchestre Regional de Kayes was founded in order to reinvigorate the local cultures from the Mand and the Kasso regions and turn some traditional themes into modern songs. Under the guidance of bandleader Harouna Barry, they evolve as one of Mali's finest orchestras. In the early 1970s, like most modern bands of Mali, the orchestra evolved into the Sidi Yassa de Kayes, named after Sidi Yassa, a late great singer. In 1977, they release one eponymous LP in 1977 on …
Cry
Cry was recorded in a shed at Taieri Mouth between 1998 and 2000 and then released by Emperor Jones on CD in 2000. Alastair has always been one of the most admired yet paradoxically ignored musicians from the New Zealand underground since he first started out in The Rip on Flying Nun Records in the early 1980s. Having already worked with the incredibly talented New Zealander otherwise known as Michael Morley, it seemed natural for MIE’s next step to go on to work with Alastair on getting …
Demiurge
Multiverse - the constellation of forward-thinking Bristol labels that also includes Tectonic, Kapsize and Caravan - reactivates its seminal Subtext imprint for a daring new LP from Emptyset. A collaboration between Mutiverse boss James 'Ginz' Ginzburg and Paul Purgas, Demiurge is the second album by Emptyset, and finds them reducing their production process down to a singular signal chain channelled into a modulated analogue hardware line (or so we're told). The results are somewhere between dr…
Here Come The Cars
A year after the Clean's reunion LP Vehicle (also their first proper album ever) put them back on the international-pop radar in 1990, guitarist David Kilgour retreated with his new Revox tape machine (which he'd been singing about rapturously in his side-project Stephen and elsewhere: "Have you seen my new tape machine?!") and cut his first solo album, Here Come the Cars, issued by Flying Nun in 1991. From the jarring cover image of David through to the last note, Here Come the Cars is a specia…
Uberfallig
Bureau B reissues Günter Schickert's album Überfällig, originally released in 1979 on Sky Records. "No sooner had electronic music broken through in Germany, principally aligned in the two schools of Düsseldorf and Berlin, than Günter Schickert also began his first musical experiments. Although GAM, the group he founded in 1973, did not then release a record, he did issue his first solo effort, Samtvogel, a year later -- an album which was eagerly snapped up and re-released by the Brain lab…
Sketches From New Brighton
*Deluxe 2LP Edition Now In Stock* Scott Morgan makes a welcome return with his seventh album of amorphous ambient drift as Loscil. Since 2001 the Vancouver resident has eked out a special niche with his much-loved Kranky releases, a sound that's equal parts dub techno momentum and tenderly organic sound design, one which consistently and carefully treads a fine line between crepuscular, chamber-like melancholy and widescreen optimism. 'Sketches From New Brighton' is an impressionistic col…
Forest of Eden
Previously unreleased tracks from the legendary eccentric folk singer Jackson C.Frank. He was Sandy Denny's boyfriend; Nick Drake, Bert Jansch, Al Stewart and others have covered his songs. His first and only album was produced by Paul Simon. After being burned in a fire and the death of his son, he became an NYC vagrant and eventually succumbed to pneumonia and cardiac arrest in 1999 at age 56.
Parallel / Grayscale
Parallel/Grayscale is the first collaborative work between Italian guitarist and composer Giuseppe Ielasi and French-Swiss composer and electroacoustic musician Kassel Jaeger. It is comprised of two different improvisation sessions. The first one took place in Paris, in October of 2011. The second happened in Oreno, in June of 2012, after the first concert Ielasi and Jaeger performed together. The first session was a pure analog device improvisation, whereas the second one was more laptop-o…
L'Origine / TEMA
Drawing inspiration from the "Action Direct" expanded guitar performances of Masayuki Takayanagi, Fusinato places the guitar at the centre of his work. A few crudely played strings provide the impetus for a long chain of electronics which obliterate the original signal and leaves us with a hyper-kinetic wall of full frequency spectrum noise. Like the piano in David Tudor early 1960's performances of Cage's Variations II, in Fusinato's work, the guitar is the object of a dialectic of simultaneous…
Jailhouse Rock
"It's been a while since Scorces sorceress, Jandek collaborator, and Volcanic Tongue branch manager Heather Leigh has ventured out on vinyl under her own name. And it may be a while longer, as Jailhouse Rock is in fact a wax reissue of a long OOP 2006 cassette classic on Michigan crud factory Fag Tapes. It was a fave of ours that year (and every year), so it feels extra celebratory to be able to offer up a freshly remastered (by Pete Swanson) LP edition of the album for global re-appreciation. S…
Brokeback And The Black Rock
In the fall of 2010, when Douglas McCombs convened a new version of the band, Brokeback hadn't played a live show for more than two years and had not recorded any new music for eight. The band, a long-running side project for Tortoise and Eleventh Dream Day's Douglas McCombs, had stiffened up, sometimes getting lost in a welter of meticulously constructed electronics. McCombs's idea was not to start over, exactly, but to start fresh, approaching similar harmonic content from a different directio…