New Arrivals
Appalachian excitation
The meeting of composer Arnold Dreyblatt and psych-folk trio Megafaun shouldn’t be seen as unlikely just because it’s cross-generational, or even (arguably) cross-genre. Such categorizations have to be set aside before taking in their Appalachian Excitation. Born in New York in 1953, Dreyblatt came up under such lauded experimental groundbreakers as Alvin Lucier, Pauline Oliveros and La Monte Young, obtaining a Master’s degree in composition from Wesleyan University. Now based in Berlin, where h…
Latex
This fourth audio document, in a series of six, is a split Lp, titled LATEX. It involves two of the most dissolute and sinful names in the Noise scene : Black Leather Jesus and Richard Ramirez. Texas legends for almost 23 years, Black Leather Jesus have destroyed minds, ears, and stereos with their extreme soundart. An orgy of blood, junk metal, chains, screaming electronics, and gay pornography. The band has become a staple of the harsh noise scene. Noise legend, Richard Ramirez has become an i…
P.A./Hard Love
On P.A./Hard Love, New York-based composer and conceptual sound artist Marina Rosenfeld generates an esoteric universe of radical sonic collisions. Developed initially in 2009, the album draws its roots following a series of idiosyncratic quasi-sculptural sound-system installations Rosenfeld installed in various disused and monumental sites including New York's Park Avenue Armory and Liverpool's Renshaw Hall car park. The music she composed for these installations was heterogeneous, reposit…
70 Years of Sunshine
In 1943 a Swiss chemist accidentally absorbed through his finger-tips a tiny amount of a compound he was researching. Later, he recorded the effects in a journal - a document of the world's very first LSD trip: 'Last Friday, April 16,1943, I was forced to interrupt my work in the laboratory in the middle of the afternoon and proceed home, being affected by a remarkable restlessness, combined with a slight dizziness. At home I lay down and sank into a not unpleasant intoxicated-like condi…
Proceed with Caution!
Whereas the earlier black jazz album Shawn-Neeq had its share of riff-based funk, Calvin Keys' second outing Proceed with Caution! (1974) sticks close to straight-ahead jazz verities with the 30-something guitarist in the studio with seven similarly young, on-the-rise musicians including Charles Owens (saxophones, flute), Oscar Brashear (trumpet), Al Hall Jr. (trombone), Kirk Lightsey (electric piano), Henry Franklin (bass), and Leon "Ndugu" Chancler (drums). Keys can really play the guitar, e…
Capitaine Present 5
Monsieur Laurent Gerard, aka Él-g, aka one third of Ghedalia Tazartes' Reines d'Angleterre has been slowly building a little world of his own with several homemade records, cassettes and CDr's through the past few years and also through several interesting collaborations. Capitaine Present is his most intimate project with already 4 volumes released on CD, cassette and DVD. This fifth outing (and first on vinyl) consists of a hallucinogenic promenade inside his psyche. Cut up spoken words, poetr…
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 …
Pansophical Cataract
John Colpitts (aka Kid Millions) is a Brooklyn-based multi-instrumentalist, composer and writer who is perhaps best known as the drummer for Oneida. Man Forever, his vehicle for exploring the outer limits of drum performance, was created to overwhelm, to investigate the nuances that bloom in the midst of repetitive music, and to act as a pure sound experience.
Originally based on the idea of creating a sort of punk-infused Metal Machine Music for drums, Man Forever has evolved from a f…
Vaseline Race
Here’s a very limited coloured vinyl thing by Cicciolina Holocaust. There’s one of those photocopied pictures on the front where I’m pretty sure I don’t want to look at it for long enough to figure out what’s going on, much like Urashima seem to specialise in - it looks like some people are doing something very bad to another person. The tracks here originally came out on cassette in 1984 and have been remastered for this release.It’s dark industrial droney harsh no…
Stranded
Since 2002, Idea Fire Company has performed and recorded as a quartet with core members Karla Borecky and Scott Foust (me!), joined by Meara O'Reilly and Jessi Swenson. (Meara and Jessi, along with Matt Krefting, start in my finally completed feature-length film Here's To Love!). I feel this LP is as strong as any I've been involved in, and I feel pretty strongly about my body of work. Stranded is the perfect companion to Anti-Natural. Excellent Karla Borecky cover. 180 gram luxury object.
Eight (+3) Tristano Compositions 1989 - For Warne Marsh
"I would like to make a few notes and hopefully clear up a potential misunderstanding or two. Most importantly, no matter what you think about the original Tristano performances, this music is not "cool" – with feverish intensity, volcanic dynamics, explosive technique, aggressive attitudes ... there is an enormous amount of drama here, and none of it is sedate, reticent, or bloodless. Note the treacherously difficult heads on tunes like "Two Not One," "Dreams," "Lennie's Pennies," and "A…
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…
United States of America Triptych (III)
Voices by David Grubbs, Magorzata Penkalla and Pete Simonelli, guitars by David Grubbs and Miron Grzegorkiewicz, organ and violin by David Maranha, Text excerpted from Vanishing Point: How to Disappear in America without a Trace Music by David Grubbs, Miron Grzegorkiewicz, David Maranha, Gosia Penkalla, Pete Simonelli
Three takes on America - three journeys and three documents. Written and recorded.Year 1939, John A. Lomax and Ruby T. Lomax in their Plymouth - going South. 6502 miles, tons of …
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…
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…
The Last Great Challenge In A Dull World
Peter Jefferies's extraordinary debut solo album, The Last Great Challenge in a Dull World, first saw life as a cassette via the Xpressway label of Port Chalmers, New Zealand, in 1990. As a result of some international underground acclaim in fanzines and mailorder catalogs -- for both the album and a striking 7-inch, 'The Fate of the Human Carbine,' released around the same time -- it soon appeared on LP and CD as well, through the Ajax label of Chicago. Within a couple of years it slipped…
Dabke 2020: folk & pop sounds of Syria
Sublime Frequencies is pleased to present the second volume of Northeast Syrian dabke music from legendary vocalist Omar Souleyman and his group. This record was compiled by Mark Gergis to coincide with the Sublime Frequencies UK/European tour in May and June of 2009, featuring live performances by Omar Souleyman himself. Culled from dozens of cassettes recorded in Syria from 1999-2008, the music here is an extension of Omar's Highway to Hassake: Folk & Pop Sounds of Syria (SF 031CD) release, to…
Doomsdayer Holiday
Following up last year's Burning Off Impurities and their recent Take Refuge In Clean Living EP, Grails return with their darkest, heaviest record yet. Written and recorded over the last 18 months,Doomsdayer's Holiday delivers on the promises made by their previous albums, taking equal pride in smoky psychedelics and mountain-ascending riffs. With Faust, Earth and Sunn O))) collaborators acting as engineers - not to mention drummer Emil Amos having recently become the new other half of Om - Grai…
The Skipper at Home
Jazz-man Henry Franklin, widely respected for his service to the finest jazz players, brought that ineffable quality called soulfulness into play when he made his first record for producer George Porter at Black Jazz, The Skipper. Not unexpectedly, his follow-up affair titled The Skipper at Home teems with the same jaunty uplift. In sync with Franklin's musical spirit on the second recording are returnees Charles Owens on saxophone, Oscar Brashear on trumpet and Kenny Climax on guitar along wi…
A living room at the bottom of a lake
gorgeous LP by this Leeds duo whose first half lives in London (and loves Whitehouse and Rush) and the other in Berlin (and loves Farley Jackmaster Funk). With several releases on labels such as Chocolate Monk, American Tapes, Troniks, Hospital Productions, or their own: Alcoholic Narcolepsy, Luke and Steven have been crafting and sculpting their psychedelic-electronic-noise-drone sound for over half a decade. But who cares and what does that sound description mean anyway? If you ask them,…