New Arrivals
Active recovering music
Active Recovering Music (ARM) is a slide whistle ensemble led by sax player Masahiko Okura. All of the members play the slide whistle. Okura debuted ARM in concert with a five-member formation in 2008. He's since continued the group's activity (though their live performances are infrequent) with changing numbers of players. This is the recording of a performance by ARM--this time with eight members--which took place at Ftarri, Tokyo, in February 2013. Each of the three pieces was composed by Oku…
Jedwabnik
More music involving the seemingly always-at-work Wojciech Kucharczyk (does the man ever sleep?), this time in a quartet alongside B a ej Król, Jerzy Mazzoll and Radek Dziubek. The project's title Dwutysi czny translates as 'two thousand' - referring, according to a brief recent interview with Easterndaze, to the year when Król first came across the music of the other three players, a discovery that eventually led him to write to them to ask if they'd donate him some of their recorded sounds to …
Asphalt And Delay
Awesome brand new LP that marks the band’s first full length album foray in to the exploration of duo improvisation. Recorded over an extended period of time, in a secret midtown Manhattan location high above the city streets, this is their first record devoted entirely to duo improvisations. The LP also features striking silkscreen cover art by Yoko Tack.Since their late-1990s inception, White Out - as comprised by multi-instrumentalist Lin Culbertson and drummer Tom Surgal - have been one of t…
Berlin
Rhodri Davies: harp. Mark Wastell: violoncello. Simon H. Fell: double bass. 'One day, I hope, the story will be written. The story of the group IST and its relationship to the birth of the music that subsequently became variously known as New London Silence or Lower Case Improv (and yes, I use those upper case letters intentionally). Perhaps the learned critics (who seem very rarely to actually ask the musicians) will tell us just what our place is in this history. Certainly we were not the firs…
Bits & Pieces
The history of - behind which we find Nico Selen of O.R.D.U.C, E.M.M. and many other guises - and Freiband, the name of Frans de Waard when it comes to all sorts of computer based, goes back for over 20 years. Selen was the first to release a LP by Kapotte Muziek (De Waard's other music enterprise, among many!), in 1990 and they have been off and on in contact. Earlier 2013 released a very limited CDR, which De Waard quite liked and in the next days he kept returning to it, eventu…
Body issues
Patricia's warm, fuzzy post-techno-house slots neatly with the Opal Tapes aesthetic on his debut album, 'Body Issues'. Six tracks come off like a boosted 1991 or Huerco S, pushing malleable bass hits below swirling streaks of melody bursting with ferric quality. There's firm parallels to be made here with Anthony Naples, albeit with a noisier bent in 'Hissy Fit', whilst on 'Melting' juicy acid forms over a brittle jack track and the sweet-but-slamming 'Jospehine' and 'Plural' appear like some GH…
Escape From New York
Spectrum Spools give flight to a right zinger from Palm Highway Chase. 'Escape From New York' has already achieved cult status in the synth interzones, notching up over 5000 downloads from the artist's myspace and bandcamp pages since 2009, before John Elliott and Peter Rehberg colluded to present the tangible artefact on wax. Flashback to 2009, maybe late winter or something like that. The Road Chief comes back from his extended stay in Belgium all laced up with new jams from the undergro…
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…
Six & Six
Originally released in 1981, JANDEK'S second album stands as an incredible document of the formative stages of his cracked genius. The musical elements are almost catatonic: 9 songs drift by as a series of slight variations on several desolate, untuned acoustic guitar phrases. First time on vinyl in over 25 years. Old-style tip on jacket. LIMITED!
Body/Head
Bill Nace (Guitar) and Kim Gordon (Guitar, voice). "So much more than a 'likely pairing,' this is a group which manages to illuminate the best of both players while simultaneously pushing them into fresh territory. Live shows have been accompanied by slowed films, and the pair's obsession with cinema comes across in the music itself. The pieces exist as vignettes in and of themselves, all the while presenting a full-bodied emotional narrative over the course of the record's 20 minutes. It…
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…
Concredrones
M.B., also known as Maurizio Bianchi doesn’t need much introduction. In the early 80s he was responsible for a string of compelling electronic music albums in the first wave of ‘industrial music’. After a hiatus of many years he returned in the late 90s and since then has been very active with many new solo releases, but also on the side with collaborations. Here he works with Mario Costa, also known as Sostrah Tinnitus, from Italy, who has had a number of releases on labels as Umbra, Beyond, My…
Gagged In Boonesville
French globe-tourist High Wolf has hand-rolled his way up Mount Fuji, trainspotted every corner of Europe, hitch-hiked across America and Australia, chugged Ganges water, and crouched on all manner of smoke-stained prayer rug since first looping a bongo back in ’09. His apprenticeship in the House of Wah nearly complete, he’s hinted at a potentially seismic shift in the High Wolf third eye doctrine lurking in the near future; perhaps his Away Team exfoliation moment is nigh. Fortunately, …
Dance Classics Vol.II
2013 repress. Kouhei Matsunaga's Dance Classics Vol. II is the continuation of his ongoing development of his more dance-oriented material, as seen from his sets with Sensational and also his other minimal techno project, NHK. Not feeling tied down to one genre, Matsunaga nestles in the Pan roster. That isn't to say, however, that he is dance per se, as witnessed from his recent collaborations with Conrad Schnitzler. The album focuses more on bass/base electronics, music for the dancefloor …
Moths
Michael Morley, Nina Canal, Sara Stephenson : electric guitars. Recorded by Roland Groenenboom at De Player, Rotterdam, August 2009 mixed at My Pit, Port Chalmers, 2011. Artworks: Eric Claridge Owl Moth & Mothface 2012 oil on canvas 30,5 x 30,5 cm each. Limited to 300 copies. Labels: Bimbo Tower Records & Dilettante Courtoisie.
Staring Into The Sun: Ethiopian Tribal Music
A contemporary survey of the tribal music of Ethiopia. Recorded in 2009 by Olivia Wyatt, this double LP showcases an array of mind-blowing sounds from the "land of eternal sunshine." Presented in this visually stunning gatefold are audio examples ranging from remote tribes -- of the Ethiopian highlands, the lower Omo and the Great Rift Valley -- to their electric analogues in the sweaty beerhalls of Addis Ababa. This collection features songs from the Azmari, poet-musicians who play the k…
Mirror | Me
This Zine was developed from a collaborative exhibition and performance organized by the writer, Brandon Stosuy, and the artist, Kai Althoff in the Summer of 2009 at Dispatch Bureau in NYC. It was displayed during the White Columns Annual 2009, during which pages were added by the original exhibition's various participants. The Zine features new materials by artists, writers and musicians such as Adam Helms, Brandon Stosuy, Hunter Hunt-Hendrix, Kai Althoff, Karlynn Holland, Lionel Maunz, Matt Za…
First Burning Attraction
Formed in 2009, Damien Dubrovnik is the Danish electronic duo of Christian Stadsgaard (Sarah's Charity) and Loke Rahbek (Sexdrome, Var, Lust For Youth), founders of the Copenhagen-based record label Posh Isolation. In their day-job as label managers, Stadsgaard and Rahbek have been instrumental in establishing the city's prolific and exciting noise/punk community and outgrowing their humble beginnings in noise/industrial culture by attracting a cult/fanatical worldwide following. Working to…
Summer meeting 2013
Alexandros Drymonitis is an MMus graduate of the Conservatorium van Amsterdam. He studied guitar in Athens, Amsterdam and Berlin, specialising in contemporary music, and specifically in the co-operation between the composer and the performer. He attended composition classes in Athens and Amsterdam, plus several electronic music seminars and workshops. He has found his place in the field of free improvisation and noise art. Nikos Kyriazopoulos works on environmental recordings in a wide range of …