New Arrivals
Say God
The 2xLP version comes in an old-style tip-on gatefold jacket with 8” x 10” insert and MP3 download coupon. In recent years, Higgs has released a number of solo outings that can only be described as the ultimate in isolation, worlds away from the hypnotic, communal rock of his band, Lungfish. Higgs follows up the 2007 album/book release Atomic Yggdrasil Tarot with his new double album Say God. Say God is an album of gospel songs and poems as presently received by this Daniel Higgs. Recorded …
Minimal Milan
Lovely compilation selected by Xiu (Oksana Rodionova) consisting of contemporary minimal electronic and deviant-techno artists based in Milan, Italy. Here's the label's mission statement as you could say: "The musical aesthetism defended by the label admits connections with post-modern qualities and challenges conventions for an innovative musical conversation between analogue instrumentation and technologies." The label will host various types of electronic music always seen throught a dark and…
Doubled Exposure
D. Charles Speer, aka Dave Shuford, is a founding member of both Rhyton and No Neck Blues Band, and also known for his work with Enos Slaughter, The Suntanama, Egypt Is The Magick #, and Coach Fingers. On ‘Doubled Exposure’ The Helix take their loose and free country rock boogie and enhance it with the blistering psych Speer explores in Rhyton, and the traditional Greek melodies delved into on the Speer solo album, ‘Arghiledes’. ‘Doubled Exposure’ was recorded by Jason Meagher at the increasingl…
Real Sugar
"Ryan Garbes is the drummer of Iowa City bands such as Wet Hair, Dunebuggy, Trash Dog, and formerly Raccoo-oo-oon. His recordings under his own name represent a unique brand of solo multi-track recording with a seamless integrity; through a skillful use of instrumentation and recording technique, Garbes eschews notions of low fidelity for songs reminiscent of traditional American garage rock produced in the haze of an early '90s UK aesthetic. Genuine pop songs, cloaked in a comforting was…
Les Femmes Savantes
The Berlin based group Les Femmes Savantes, named after the famous play by Molière, Learned Ladies. This music is just as proud and individual, being a success and almost a myth in the improvised world, combining many styles of music. Les Femmes Savantes are Hanna Hartman, electronics, little objects, Andrea Neumann, inner piano, Sabine Ercklentz, trumpet, Ute Wasserman, voice, Ana Maria Rodriguez, electronics, each one of them an individual master. Together they let focus stay on either the gro…
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 Child Goes Burying Dead Insects
A rarity, while not being in higher atmospheres of any kind, the film "Kodomo Ga Mushi No Shigai Wo Umeni Iku" aka "A Child Goes Burying Dead Insects" forced up a third sleep state, third dream state and third reality check.., wishing the colours were really the colours one would see everywhere, instead of the disgusting digital prints or pixelated madness that get shoved up our body holes! It makes me wonder if I am really here right now or if I had seen the film before 2009 which is not …
Hemp Is Here
Leven Signs' Hemp Is Here came and went in 1985, as both a cassette release (Unlikely Records) and vinyl release (Cordelia) in the blink of an eye. The duo of Peter Karkut and Maggie Turner managed to craft one of the strangest, most affecting albums of new wave experimentalism of the era, but due to the album's impossible-to-find status, it's been largely forgotten and continuously overlooked ever since. A chance encounter with the cassette version of Hemp Is Here led Brad Rose of Digitali…
Tape-Recordings 1981-82
Olaf Schirm alias Symboter is a berlin-born electronic artist and musician. In the late 70s he lived in Munich. At that time he got Inspired by early Tangerine Dream, Klaus Schulze, Kraftwerk and other international computer music avantgarde artists. He used commercial synthesizers imported from Japan and his gigantic custom-built Symboter Modular System.
As technician of Gershon Kingsley ("Popcorn", "I feel love" sequence) he was able to use his Moog Modular System in many of his own songs andf…
Oh
Roger's reigning post-Burma moment; basement 4-track recordings of unknown-tongue space psych, ecstatically rendered.
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…
An Ambassador for Laing
LP version. Debut album from the Edinburgh-based duo of Marc Dall and Alex Ander, who work with intricately-stacked percussion, dub-wise bass and a rich harmonic tapestry of processed voices, keys, harp, vibraphone, guitar, woodwind, strings and synthesizer -- every sound re-sampled to the nth degree then subjected to subtle automation and rigorously fine-tuned over a period of many months. From the mesmerizing, pastoral drift of "Anger Sees Red" and "Dwelling by the Meadow" to agitated arabesqu…
Free Reign
Their 7th album! Record & produced by the band in their hometown of Liverpool & mixed w/ assistance from Daniel Lopatin (ONEOHTRIX POINT NEVER, FORD & LOPATIN). The title is apt for this particularly bold & assured new transmission from planet Clinic, it neither turns its back on the sond of their previous albums, nor seeks to recreate them.
Nepenthe
Julianna Barwick returns with the successor to 2011's charming The Magic Place. Given how successful that self-recorded LP was, it’s surprising to see that the Louisiana-born singer has looked to an external producer to document and frame her work this time around, namely Sigur Ros associate Alex Somers. Barwick once again uses delay-pedals to build heaven-scraping towers of chorused plainsong out of her earnestly, achingly pretty soprano, placing them in what John Foxx - whose 90s’ ambient reco…
Ornate shroud
Hopefully MRTYU requires little introduction, because the project evades easy description. An odd compound of vedic imagery, metal misanthropy, and violin agony, this music moves away from any particular fan base in pursuit of its distant, darkened idols. Ornate shroud is MRTYU's most potent spawn to date. Hewing closer to song form than previous releases, the album conceals Antony Milton's violent guitar and violin work behind MRTYU's characteristic murk. Its pieces transition from jagged riffs…
Broken iteration
The Japanese percussion player who lives in Europe has three fields of interest: 1, non-idiomatic improvisation (that includes idiomatic researches about it, or workshops on it). 2, electro acoustic composition. 3, plural disciplinary collaboration (with words, images, body movements etc) and it would seem to me that these four pieces here are a combination of 1 and 2. [] Murayama's playing is very minimal and we do recognize indeed the element of percussion instruments, and Murayama explores hi…
Disappearance
Pioneering electronic minimalist Taylor Deupree and revered Japanese composer Ryuichi Sakamoto collaborate properly for the first time with the willowy ambient beauty of 'Disappearance'. They previously crossed paths when Deupree remixed a song from Sakamoto's 'Chasm' album in 2006, and since then they've reached a mutual appreciation for the themes of 'Isolation, solitude, contemplation' which perfuse the delicate structures of 'Disappearance'. Its initial ideas were sketched out during rehears…
Barcelona Express
Stunning work of radical free music by saxophonist Masayoshi Urabe and guitarist Rinji Fukuoka (Overhang Party / Majutsu no Niwa). Recorded in 2004 in various locations (France, Spain, Switzerland and Japan), this album brings together elements of free jazz, rock, noise and even folk music, in a way that is magically spontaneous, iconoclastic and full of grace in every single sound produced. Pretty much uncomparable to any of the music 'out there' nowadays, these are wild cuts by two wild …
Works 1987-1993
Both of these projects hardly need an introduction. Merzbow is since the late 70s the project of Masami Akita working in the field of noise music, having released a few hundred CDs/LPs/cassettes by now. In 1987 Kapotte Muziek was then the solo project of Frans de Waard, after Christian Nijs left the group early '87. De Waard concentrated on working with other musicians, and started trading tapes with a few musicians he was already in contact with, and one of them was Merzbow. The first release w…
Sunrise
The music of My Education, a five-piece group from Austin, Texas, tends towards the classical side of the spectrum. If you’ve read any recent think-piece about how the lines between rock bands and classical ensembles are blurring, you could pretty easily swap their name into the list of case studies provided without sacrificing accuracy. Besides recording their own compositions, they’ve also released their take on Arvo Pärt’s taut “Spiegel im Spiegel” and collaborated with the hip-hop group däle…