New Arrivals
Live from Festival au Desert, Timbuktu
Two days before the 2012 rebellion in northern Mali. Soldiers are everywhere. Guns mounted on pickups; low-flying surveillance planes. Several thousand people have gathered outside Timbuktu to celebrate the music and culture of the Sahara at the 12th edition of the Festival au Desert. Three months later, Sharia descends on northern Mali. A millennial history is suppressed. Shrines destroyed. Secular music banned. Before, the streets were alive with music. Weddings, baptisms, celebrations …
The Just Reproach
The Just Reproach documents the second concert given by John Tilbury and Oren Ambarchi as a duo. When they first performed together in Reykjavik, Iceland in March 2012, the aptness of the pairing was evident. When they reprised the duo at London's Cafe OTO in September the same year in the concert presented here, the city was in the midst of a heatwave. With the air-conditioning turned off to accommodate the low volume of the performance, the uncomfortable squirming of the audience members…
Scott 2
2013 repress. "Originally released in 1968, Scott 2 made it all the way to number one on the UK pop charts, perhaps the strangest number one hit in pop history. Continuing with his orchestral obsession, Scott 2 features over-the-top string and horn arrangements, occasionally veering into dangerously schmaltzy territory. This production style is in drastic contrast to the lyrical content, songs of despair, prostitution, homosexuality, and brutal honesty, indicting the same glamorous and gli…
Mad Dog\'s Hustle
A too long unheard blacksploitation soundtrack from the Fantasy Productions house -- grooves from the pool of players who laid down the sounds on Secret Stash's fantastic Porno Groove compilation -- the score for the very little seen and long lost Mad Dog's Hustle from 1974! The music is credited to The Upstroke -- the same unidentified musicians from Fantasy's adult film scores -- and in a similar fashion to the porno soundtrack material, they're working very much in the appropriate idiom, but …
Yird Muin Starn
A sonic map of the artwork and cosmos, Yird Muin Starn is at once funny, moving and informative, surging from singing to hymnal pockets of throbbing space where scale is both tiny and boundless'. The third element in their new public artwork 'Yird Muin Starn' (old Scots for Earth Moon Star) this album of cosmological songs and sonified constellations is Matthews McIntosh second space related release. Composed and engineered by Matthews from field recordings gathered all over the Galloway f…
Patiences
A serie of duet with André Jaume and another musician, recorded in 1980 and 1983 by Jean Roché, Jean-Marc Foussat, Daniel Deshays. Raymond Boni, electric guitar. Hervé Bourde, flute. André Jaume, saxophones, bass clarinet. Jean-Marc Montera, acoustic guitare. François Mechali, doublebass. Fred Ramanonjiarisoa, piano. Gérard Siracusa, percussions.
Rufen
Rufen is the second installment in a trilogy of Qluster music, following on from the Fragen (BB 076CD/LP) studio album. In four impressive live recordings, Hans-Joachim Roedelius and Onnen Bock unfold aural panoramas which can only be described, in the truest sense of the word, as fantastic. Had Claude Debussy not already composed 'Prelude To The Afternoon Of A Faun,' then Qluster would have been ideally placed to do so, their transparency and polymorphism so reminiscent of his high Impression…
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 …
A history of every one
'A History of Every One' by Bill Orcutt is an album of songs: minstrel songs, holiday songs, hymns, marches, cowboy songs, Disney songs, work songs, delta blues. The original tunes themselves are nothing special, well known, but not particularly well-regarded. Most would be filler on a mid-60's Doris Day or Burl Ives LP. What Orcutt does with them however is remarkable: expanding upon techniques developed on 2011's 'How the Thing Sings' and incorporating ideasforged since his recording of 'The S…
Metz
Some will find it hard to believe that a glamrock band with a gritty urban veneer came from Texas and stuck together long enough to release this milestone record. Indeed, I was startled to learn that they're from Texas and not NYC or London. Clearly the underground music scene throughout Texas is fertile with talent and enough socio-cultural diversity to support any genre, including mid-70s glamrock. Metz take on glam includes some of the associated clichés like heavy chunks of chord strokes and…
Dance Classics Vol. I
2013 repress. Born in Osaka, Kouhei Matsunaga is a musician and an illustrator. He started drawing during childhood under the influence of his grandfather. He grew up listening to hardcore techno and hip-hop, studied architecture and has been mainly making music since 1992. Under many different aliases (NHK, NHKyx, Internet Magic, Koyxen) he has released numerous albums on labels such as Skam Records, Wordsound, Raster-Noton and his first-ever album Upside Down on Mille Plateaux in 1998. He …
the 15,000 day boat trip
november 2009 release ; pristine electro-acoustic work from cenotaph’s john w. fail (responsible for both a criminally under-appreciated quadruple tape-box on c. spencer yeh’s dronedisco &, partially, the “lied music vs. boy-band tax returns” lp on ultra eczema ... as well as full-length collaborations with spiral joy band & ben reynolds) ...inhabiting similar head-space as graham lambkin’s recent “softly softly copy copy,” the piece in question here takes it source material from live-played ins…
The Weight Of Accumulation
few copies available - creen printed & hand numbered mail-order only edition of 500, sold out at source. Weight Of Accumulation contains two long magnifications of a piece that has been performed, in various versions, in Berlin, Amsterdam, Brooklyn and Seattle. This work is based on John Coltrane's composition Living Space.
"Moving from minimalism to free jazz for inspiration, this new album by Eleh is inspired by the later period of John Coltrane’s career. Although elements of these two pieces …
Love Song
"The singularly strange storytelling power of Jun Konagayas unit GRIM had been largely overlooked until haang niap records "Folk Songs For An Obscure Race" compilation of the groups early 80s material. Konagaya restarted the group in 2009 and these are their first new recordings - and a full album to boot. Split release between Art Into Life and Eskimo Records! A story in 8 volumes, ripe with deviant madness and gathered salvic capacity. Handmade clock artwork by Konagaya - each one is di…
Jailhouse Rock
"It's been a while since Scorces sorceress, Jandek collaborator, and Volcanic Tongue branch manager Heather Leigh has ventured out on vinyl under her own name. And it may be a while longer, as Jailhouse Rock is in fact a wax reissue of a long OOP 2006 cassette classic on Michigan crud factory Fag Tapes. It was a fave of ours that year (and every year), so it feels extra celebratory to be able to offer up a freshly remastered (by Pete Swanson) LP edition of the album for global re-appreciation. S…
The Letter
This is the first album by Liberez, a group formed by recording engineer John Hannon and Pete Wilkins in Southend. The project began life exploring a deconstruction of the traditional "band" form before expanding to a quartet with the addition of vocalist Nina Bosnic, and multi-instrumentalist Tom James Scott. Musically rooted in improvisation, the band sought a progression from the loosely described "noise rock" sound at their inception into more abstract territories. The tracks were recorded a…
Animalia Corolla
Most of us are living in an urban world, dominated by constant noise and contagious stress. Our ears are conditioned by this aggressive environment and have often lost the ability to perceive another discreet world surrounding us. It might be hidden but also swarming, vivid and incredibly musical. We are all able to prick up our ears to some birds chattering together, the wind shaking leaves, toads singing serenades or old spirits telling us their immemorial adventures…Since its creation in 2006…
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…
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…
Kenzo Deluxe
Guitarist Chris Forsyth is a unique voice in the realm of American music, having emerged from the challenging free form expressionism of his old group Peeesseye with a lyrical command rare in any genre. His newest work brings his trademark lyricism to new heights in his most straightforward setting yet. Gone are the fleshed out rock band arrangements of last year’s Paranoid Cat LP, replaced on Kenzo Deluxe, by Forsyth shunning overdubs and playing his transcendent songs alone in a room on his el…