New Arrivals
Grapes and Snakes
Grapes and Snakes is the first collaborative work of two of the most respected American underground experimental/noise artists, Aaron Dilloway and Jason Lescalleet. Using purely analog synths and tape manipulation, they build a foggy psychoacoustic mass that lies between dynamic yet patiently treated tape-music and industrial howl. Aaron Dilloway has been releasing and recording music since the age of 16. He was a member of experimental bands Couch, Galen and Universal Indians. He is a form…
Character
Opportunities for introspection have come few and far between for Canadian-born, New York City-based cellist Julia Kent. After coming to prominence as a member of the cello-driven group Rasputina in the ‘90s, she went on to arrange and play on numerous recordings and tour extensively as a member of Antony and the Johnsons, among other projects.The opportunity to explore her own emotional and creative world came with her solo LPs, Delay (2007) and Green and Grey (2011), and it is something she ap…
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 …
Spectrum ripper
CD was produced in 1997. LP is from 2013. The extreme collage sound and insane vocals of Maso Yamazaki, one of the worlds leading noise musicians. Brutal frequencies and rabid screaming vocals mix to create the finest album Masonna has ever produced. Divided into 25 tracks, this is being considered the last word in noise recordings! Ltd x 300 copies on brown vinyl in a full colour sleeve. Comes with CD version in a card sleeve. Mastered by Denis Blackham.
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…
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!
The watchers
The Watchers is a historic collaboration between Lubomyr Melnyk and James Blackshaw. These new pieces are being released as a CD/LP with material exclusive to each format. LP is pressed in an edition of 500. I first met Lubomyr Melnyk at a festival called Hea Uus Heli in October 2008. We were both scheduled to play that day and I was very excited to see him perform. Before the show I bought several LPs from him and mentioned as much. Lubomyr (more than modest and courteous, as he always i…
La Bas (1987-1992)
JFK is the project of British rock and electronic musician Anthony Di Franco (Ramleh, Skullflower, Ethnic Acid). Originally active between 1987 and 1992, JFK was conceived as an experimental rock band that could create "a total music, absorbing all possibilities." This exclusive CD compiles rare and previously-unreleased tracks, including the Temple of Set/Sexodus 7" (previously-released by Fourth Dimension in 1992). The JFK sound is a brain-melting clash of electronic rhythms, blazing guitar ri…
Vibrant Forms
Double LP version. Kostas Soublis' productions under the Fluxion moniker helped define legendary Berlin imprint Chain Reaction, and with 1999's Vibrant Forms, the Greek producer released a milestone in the dub techno genre. Hazy and distant, there was still more than enough dancefloor push to propel Soublis into the (very short) list of genre legends, and make Vibrant Forms one of the very rare techno albums that works from beginning to end. Out of press for far too long, this new edition of…
Olympians
‘Experimental’ bands are never going to please everyone; a lot of them seem almost uninterested in being anything but show-offs and twats, and there’s occasionally no attempt to make a connection twixt music and listener. All we get is: ‘marvel at my amazing button-pushing skills.’ And then, suddenly and horrifically, you turn into your dad: ‘that’s not music, that’s noise!’ Despite the post-watershed name, Fuck Buttons have always been a more subtle and meditative addition to the experime…
Sorrow Come Pass Me Around
A collection of spiritual and gospel songs performed in informal non-church settings between 1965 and 1973. Most are guitar-accompanied and performed by active or former blues artists. "Most records of black religious music contain some form of gospel singing or congregational singing recorded at a church service. This album, though, tries to present a broader range of performance styles and contexts with the hope of showing the important role that religious music plays in the Southern bl…
A Gourd of Gold
2013 release "From the time we started Latitudes, we’ve held a secret wish list of bands that we intended to lure into our studio. We’ve cut a major notch in our bedpost by finally scoring with Arbouretum, a band that meets universal approval at Latitudes HQ. Arbouretum offer up four cover versions of the brilliant Gordon Lightfoot, the oft-overlooked Canadian singer-songwriter who helped define the folk-rock sound of the Sixties and Seventies. The highlight of the session is unsurprisingly the …
Solitaire
Beautifully presented reissue of classic archival electroacoustic works, within "Warszawa-Oslo" project, a recollection, phonographic documentation and reactivation of bonds between Polish and Norwegian electro-acoustic music, presentation of their individual character and unquestionable significance on the international scale. This beautifully designed set (with extensive booklet of note) collects some of the most exciting, shimmering and crystalline electronic sounds to be unearthed in quite a…
Goose vibrations
GOL (Jean-Marcel Busson, Frédéric Rebotier, Ravi Shardja, and Samon Takahashi). GOL was formed in 1988 in Paris by Jean-Marcel Busson, Frédéric Rebotier, Ravi Sharda and Samon Takahashi. The quartet embodies, within a post-dada spirit, a lost rural tradition. GOL plays flute, horns, guitar, violin, toys, selfmanufactured instruments, tapes, turntables, voices, various percussion instruments and electronics, an appropriateness of both traditional string instrument and handmade low fi equipment. G…
Toxic Cosmopolitanism
Kassel Jaeger is a Swiss-French artist based in Paris, France, and is a member of the GRM (Groupe de Recherches Musicales). Toxic Cosmopolitanism is his second full-length release for Editions Mego -- a release which explores and questions the very nature of the material experiments contained within. Each side consists of two clearly-defined sections based on the same material. Side A comprises of "Toxic Cosmopolitanism," a large-scale work based on distinct sounds of different cultures, …
Live! At The Butchery
Three guys in South Africa obsessed with Can, Red Crayola, Pere Ubu & like sounds, a disdain toward apartheid, & the means to record themselves make one fantastic 200+ press LP in 1981 which disappears in obscurity. S.S. Records gives it a second life. Underground DIY classic which belongs on the NWW list (if they only knew about its existence!). 330 pressed.
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…
Lemuria
The hidden meanings are those that are at the origin of things. In an interview to Blow Up magazine in 2010, Venetian sound artist Enrico Coniglio, commenting on his aesthetic approach to the soundscape (it is the result of the aggregation of clusters of elements that have reason for existence in relation to their own specific function), marked off the traces for a path that some time later would take him to collaborate with the photographer and field recordist Giovanni Lami, from Ravenna, in …
So sorry
A meeting between Japanese sound artist Takahiro Kawaguchi and two american improvisors, Nick Hoffman (head of the Pilgrim Talk label) and Aaron Zarzutzki. Recorded by Brian Sulpizio at The Chateau, Chicago, in September 2011 and then edited and mixed by Giuseppe Ielasi in Oreno.Numbered edition of 250 copies. Black vinyl (cut at SST), screenprinted cover on heavy grey stock.
Future Slip
For her fifth solo album, Samara Lubelski finds a new home on Ecstatic Peace, with label boss Thurston Moore taking on a role as producer, even roping in his band's drummer (the estimable Steve Shelley). Moore recruited Lubelski for violin duties on his own solo LP, 2007's Trees Outside The Academy, and set about coaxing her into recording a different type of record from her established Social Registry output. Future Slip certainly diverges from the more baroque folk tendencies of her recent wor…