New Arrivals
Shadow of events
'Shadow Of Events is the third album by Oslo, Norway sound artist, producer and musician Alexander Rishaug, following his Asphodel CD Possible Landscape (2004) and 2001's Panorama on the Smalltown Supersound label. The album was recorded over a five year period and mixed in Berlin last year. Not unlike his previous albums but apparently more refined Shadow Of Events combines a warm and organic haunting quality blended with both abstract and concrete tones and subtle digital noises. 'Most …
Music for Earbuds
Music for Earbuds is composed entirely from headphone feedback which makes some surprisingly organic (as well as electronic) sounds, Stephen Cornford writes to introduce his new CD. A collection of sounds stark and stubborn, as a listener you hit against their form, slide on their surfaces. These sounds so alien yet alluring call you to spend time with them, attend to them. They mark the edges of hearing and understanding. The edge here is the ear that hears as listening encounters nothing but i…
Don't tell the driver
Finally, after 15 years, Big Mick Turner has turned in the big rock record we always knew he had in him. Yeah, Don't Tell the Driver is a different kind of record from all the Mick Turner records -- not just his own, but the ones he's done with Dirty Three, Bonny Billy, Cat Power, Fungus Brains, and Venom P. Stinger put together. So, what's so different about Don't Tell the Driver anyway? Well, Mick grew a mustache for this one. That must mean it's his Sgt. Pepper; a consolidation and developmen…
Osaka Fortune
Osaka Fortune is the meeting of two Norwegians and to Japanese artists Ð two drummers and two noise musicians. The album was recorded in Osaka, Japan February 2011. The quartet had previously performed live together, but this time they set up a studio recording on their tour of Japan. Jojo Hiroshige is the guitarist and leader of infamous Japanese noise band Hijokaidan, which has been going since 1979, known for their violent and energetic performances. Hiroshige has also run Alchemy Records sin…
Danse Sacrale
A cherry-picked compendium of EDM prototypes circa 1956-1971 by Pierre Henry, Jean-Claude Vannier, Igor Wakhevitch, Henk Badings and more "The roots of Electronic Dance Music" (EDM) by definition. An unlikely combination of early recordings by international electronic and avant-garde composers as well as infrequent collaborators retrospectively unified by their commitment to the musical enhancement of 20th Century ballet and the evolution of modern dance. Presenting key exponents of the musique …
Winds & Skins
Winds & Skins transpired to be the very last set of recordings made by Afro-Cuban percussionist Sabu Martinez, who sadly passed away precisely one month after this December 1978 session was committed to tape. The album draws a line under a career that saw the illustrious musician performing alongside Dizzy Gillespie and Art Blakey as well as releasing a string of out-and-out classic Latin jazz records. Here the noted conguero teams up with the lauded saxophonist/flautist Sahib Shihab, who himsel…
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 …
Scott 2
2013 repress. "Originally released in 1968, Scott 2 made it all the way to number one on the UK pop charts, perhaps the strangest number one hit in pop history. Continuing with his orchestral obsession, Scott 2 features over-the-top string and horn arrangements, occasionally veering into dangerously schmaltzy territory. This production style is in drastic contrast to the lyrical content, songs of despair, prostitution, homosexuality, and brutal honesty, indicting the same glamorous and gli…
Good luck mr. Gorsky
Good Luck mr. Gorsky is a Trio formed in 2004 in Thessaloniki, Greece, by Savvas Metaxas, Spiros Emmanouilidis and Thanasis Papadopoulos. They are experimenting with a variety of instruments and musical genres to build their own sound. Their music focuses on electronic compositions, using both physical and electronic sound sources. Field recordings, analog synthesizers, prepared piano and trumpet are currently used for creating their compositions.
In this album the trio took a series of improvi…
Ensemble Pearl
Cosmic, heavy amplified rock drops and ripples, auras radiate and expand into cloud forms, through which lightning bolts. Tides rise, the moons wax upon a place somewhere between Link Wray, Hex-era Earth and early Tangerine Dream. The echoes return, leaving a trail that blows and drifts, creating a separate piece. Ensemble Pearl are Atsuo, William Herzog, Michio Kurihara and Stephen O'Malley. Their debut album also features the elemental forces of Eyvind Kang and Timba Harris. These playe…
Ten Jin
Remarkable subterranean radicals have been getting to enter the stage since mid-late 2000's via the label Lust Vessel and the lineage, which are actual first ever fulcrum of genuine industrial cassette culture and the actuality in Japan, after a long period of the mostly scorched ground for that culture from the far east. This is a document of an aspect of thee lust-age and the assembly, featuring six assassins which are true to themselves and standing on their own territories.
Tongue Knax ; a h…
UKMerge/Strict
Hand-stamped 180g white label Inga Copeland furnishes new imprint All Bone with two grubby sound system tools produced by John T. Gast ov Henny Moan fame. It follows her \'Don\'t Look Back, That\'s Not Where You\'re Going\' 12\" with a more rugged, minimal UK dancehall sound iced by those knowing vocals. Top side stars the barely-hinged, pitching snares and dread digi dub of \'UKMERGE\' gilded with drowsy utterances, whilst flipside they tilt the tempo to a bouncing blend of mutant Dubstep and b…
Calmont breakdown
New solo album by the highly prolific yet always captivating Richard Youngs, whose music can waver healthily between new forms of singer-songwriter material, lo-fi drones and all manner of avant-garde forms. Here, his music sways towards the difficult and embraces organ drones and swells, frazzled electronics, a voice that is at once unnerving and unnerved, and more besides. Anybody expecting a comfortable listen should be prepared.
I Love It When You Snore
Mats Gustafsson is perhaps the pre-eminent saxophonist of this post-free jazz/improv era. A perfect combination of Peter Brotzmann's fiery passion, Evan Parker's extended technique and Ken Vandermark's willingness to explode genre boundaries, Gustafsson's discography spans over two decades and sports numerous must-hear recordings with a long laundry list of collaborators, including such luminaries as Brotzmann, Vandermark, Joe McPhee, Jim O'Rourke, Derek Bailey, Sonic Youth and The Ex. Illustrio…
Identity Picks
"Over the last decade, Burlington, Vermont songwriter/producer Ryan Power has tirelessly embarked on the quest to write the definitive song based music, full of accuracy, refinement, deliberation, and perfectly-placed shifting harmonic puzzles. Ryan's latest Identity Picks for NNA Tapes is an eight track song cycle that dances through lush jazz pads, aquatic smooth jazz funk styles, and the sensitive side of progressive rock. These songs are long, shifting compositions, slowly unfolding an…
We Will Always Be
There's a disarming honesty to the way Michigan-based husband and wife duo Windy & Carl communicate with one another. A blog post from Windy, published in late 2011, describes the making of We Will Always Be, framing it in the context of their relationship. "Yeah, we have had bumps in the road, and on occasion it seems as if we may never recover from these bumps, but we do," she wrote. That type of candor doesn't stop at the written word; it also bleeds through into the duo's music. Often their …
Caim in Bird Form
Opal Tapes' visionary bossman Stephen Bishop synthesises spellbinding post-techno ecologies on his debut slab of wax as Basic House. 'Caim In Bird Form' is an engrossing refinement of the arcane, buckled structures and textures best heard on his 'I'm Not A Heaven Man' album and an excellent split with Prostitutes for Blowing Up The Workshop. It's a sound that was conceived in relative isolation, yet feels intrinsically plugged into the zeitgeist and highly aware of fringe actions in the wake of …
Beyond the Valley of Ultrahits
Thus was the simple dare handed to Richard Youngs from his friend Andrew "Paz" Paine during their weekly Sunday meet-up. Ever the modest master, Youngs said in accepting this friendly challenge that he merely endeavored to capture the "beats and hooks" of contemporary pop. He's never attempted to disguise his gift for catchy musical phrases, though they may have come by way of careening, pleading, soothing or challenging multi-tracked voices.We present the results here as Beyond The Valley Of Ul…
Fait a la machine
40+ min of heavy machinery pounding, hissing, and vibrating, plus a bonus 63 minute CDR of the dronier side of machines at work. If you enjoy artists like Vivenza, Matt Heckert, early Esplendor Geometrico, or Chop Shop, this might be right up your alley. "Unlike a lot of recordings of natural and dissonant phenomena, Fait a la Machine works just as well as a piece of music as it does an audio documentation of the world surrounding us. It makes that leap from interesting to enjoyable in a way…
El Tren Fantasma - The Signal Man's Mix
A 12' Vinyl with two remixed tracks from the CD "We know Chris Watson mostly from his works dealing with sounds from nature, animal wild life and stormy weather. A decade ago he worked as a sound recordist for the BBC who were doing a documentary on the Ferrocarriles Nacionales de Mexico, a train company with a trail from Los Mochis to Veracruz, coast to coast, through cities and wild life. All of that sound material is now used in 'El tren Fantasma', the ghost train (since it no longer ex…