New Arrivals
The Spectacle of Light Abductions
The book is 12 full-color pages of art, text and photos in the full size LP format."After many years as half of the highly influential SKATERS with James Ferraro, 2 solo albums on Olde English Spelling Bee (BLACK JOKER and MONOPOLY CHILD STAR SEARCHERS) and countless tapes and CDs, SPENCER CLARK has taken it to the next level. Layers of cosmic and alien sounds inhabit their own world and act as metaphors you can access subconsciously or explicitly. Clearer and more lucid than previous rel…
One four and two twos
John Stevens, batterie et voix. Paul Rutherford, trombone et euphonium. Evan Parker, saxophones ténor et soprano. Barry Guy, contrebasse et électroniques. Londres, août 1978. Un quartet initialement sorti en vinyl chez View en 1980 et en CD chez Konnex en 1994. En bonus, Paul Rutherford, trombone et électroniques et Barry Guy, contrebasse à Milan en 1979. John Stevens, batterie et voix et Evan Parker, saxophone soprano à Londres en 1992. Free et historique!
Purge
Kevin Drumm's 2007 cassette 'Purge' on iDEAL went out of stock in less than a week. This is the CD version of that killer thing. Intense listening taking you deep into the known unknown, or perhaps the unknown known. Drumm's noise is extremely powerful and dynamic.; travelling frequencies, rich with details, with very little hope, with guaranteed exhaustion after frequent listening. I always think about Black Metal when I am listening to Drumm's works,Ê they share the same cold and darkness. 'Pu…
Kogetsudai
Kogetsudai is Sylvain Chauveau's 10th album, the second in a trilogy initiated by Singular Forms (Sometimes Repeated) (2010), where the song structure is dismantled and reconstructed on the fringe of silence. Whereas Singular Forms found inspiration from Abstract Painting, Kogetsudai is influenced by Zen rock gardens found in Japan Ñ also the location where the album was conceived (for the most part) Ñ and from which the album borrows its title. Layers of minimal electronic sounds and filtered f…
Erotic Yorkshire
Mutant Ape is the insane noise project by Yorkshire, UK resident George Proctor. George runs the Turgid Animal label, which since 2005 has been the go-to place for harsh noise, power electronics and other demented spuzz releasing over 500 CDs, CDRS, cassettes, LPs, 10"s, 7"s etc. He has been releasing Mutant Ape sounds wherever and whenever establishing his classic yet contemporary noise/horror vision of lust and spectacle as one of the premier scum artists of the last decade. Erotic Yorkshire i…
Temple
'Temple' is the final installment in Jan Jelinek's series of four vinyl compilations that bring together the wide variety of his music: commissioned works, live recordings, collaborations with other musicians as well as unreleased material from the last five years. Temple stems from a collaboration with French-Canadian choreographer Sylvain Émard. Temple is a re-worked excerpt of the music for the dance piece Fragments – Volume I and is a 10 minute drone work that builds from nothing more than a…
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 …
Brombron 27: Nijmegen pulse
Korm Plastics is proud to present the twenty-seventh 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 …
s/t
Church was always a drag when I was a child. Dressed in Sunday best, I struggled to enact respect and silence throughout the entire mass. However, if church had sounded more like GA’AN, I would have been there any day of the week. Nothing in Peoria sounded like this. This is music to sacrifice virgins to. This is the soundtrack to Everyman’s epic Norse BDSM fantasy of destruction and rebirth. The scenarios conjured by these jams make the death of Sardanopolus look like kid stuff. Captcha Records…
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…
Das Testament
Backwards proudly presents the reissue of a private Maurizio Bianchi vinyl LP, issued in a small edition of 300 copies in 1983 and titled "Das Testament". M.B. is an Italian pioneer of noise music, born near Milan. Bianchi began to produce music in 1979, and since 1980 has used electronic equipment with the avowed goal "to produce technological sounds and in such a way to work on complete realising of the modern decadence". Now remastered, for this release MB plays electronics, rhythms, neutroni…
Quanta Of Light
Limited, hand-stamped white label edition** Highly disciplined master of visceral intensity, Daniel Menche, presents a one-off album for Touch's great white label series. Daniel's work is gladly accepted by both noise and more "musical" spheres, releasing on a wealth of labels including Important Records, Editions Mego and Sub Rosa among many others. Taken as a whole, they capture and play with a timeless sense of drama and direct emotional rawness that's hard to ignore. For Touch, 'Quant…
Helena Espvall and Masaki Batoh
Restocked, few available..."If the pentagrams and moccasins and ponchos of the now nearly bygone “freak folk” era made listening to Fairport Convention cool again, Helena Espvall and Masaki Batoh’s self-titled collaboration serves as a reminder that British longhairs of the ’60s were nerds, nerds, nerds. Cellist Espvall, best known for her work with Espers, and Batoh, the guitarist of Japanese psych band Ghost, deploy an arsenal of exotic stringed instruments. They play earnest cover…
BIPPP : French Synth-Wave 1979/85
Sounding as current as any of the recent output from France's Ed Banger, Kitsune or Institubes labels, and on influential blueprint for the evolution of the French electronic music genre at large, the majority of the performers featured on B.I.P.P.P. never made it beyond limited DIY pressings of 500 or 1000 copies of 7" vinyl singles.
Spider John
This vinyl-only album fills a crucial gap in the evolution of legendary folk artist Spider John Koerner. Recorded in between 1965's Spider Blues and 1969's Running, Jumping, Standing Still (with Willie Murphy, both released on Elektra), Koerner is captured here live and unaccompanied at The Ash Grove in Los Angeles, bringing to light an exciting and previously-undocumented period in the career of Spider John. The excellent recording captures Koerner at the absolute peak of his guitar-playin…
United States of America Triptych (I)
Voice by Pete Simonelli, guitar by Miron Grzegorkiewicz, bass Guitar by Michael‚ Biela, turntable by DJ Lenar. Text excerpted from 1939 Southern Recording Trip Fieldnotes by John Lomax and Ruby LomaxAudio quotes excerpted from their recordings.
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…
Convulsive Threshold
Two heavyweight explorers of sound and technology, Russell Haswell and Yasunao Tone, both undertaking separate rigorous experiments into the synthesis of sound and all its remits, converge for one helluva collaborative work. ‘Convulsive Threshold’ is the result of years of research and experimentation, Haswell’s systems of hybrid analogue/digital audio generation acting as one of the starting points for this relentess piece of material, which are then subjected to Tone’s MP3 Deviation tec…
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…
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…