New Arrivals
Repo
The frazzled and fractured electronic rhythms of Brooklyn noisemakers Black Dice are bent into shape once again on this fifth studio album from the band. The album, titled Repo, is comprised of home recordings and sessions from New York’s Rare Book Room studios. It’s another fine example of Black Dice’s singular aesthetic, which has been carefully honed through years of equipment abuse in low rent venues, art galleries and other improvised performance spaces. The record comes with a 20-page book…
ØØ Void
Double LP edition: Lengths of stretched distortion rattle the grey matter, unnervingly slow and severe. With Sunn O)))’s second album, ØØ Void, the sonic misery nurtured to functionality by Greg Anderson and Stephen O’Malley stays simple and repetitive, a tabula rasa having yet to realize the full scope of its potential. With this album, Sunn O))) worked as a three-piece, collaborator Stuart Dalquist coming up with its opener, “Richard,” which is a solid fourteen and a half minutes of be…
Gramercy
On 'Gramercy', we find clarinet abuser Gareth Davis (who might be best known for collaborations with Machinefabriek and Steven R. Smith) paired with virtuoso cellist Frances-Marie Uitti. Uitti is widely revered for her unusual and original twin bow technique, which allows her to eke out far more sounds from the humble cello that you might initially expect. These sweeps and drones are matched perfectly with Davis's patented haunted drones and breathy chokes resulting in a deftly academic yet unne…
The Ballasted Orchestra
The much-in-demand vinyl version of the second (or third, depending on how you calculate) Stars of the Lid album, their first for Kranky, now finally reissued on vinyl. The original 4 track cassette recordings were remastered and new lacquers were cut, and the original artwork has been updated* When it comes to genre-defining releases, even releases that define a band's career, few sum up ambient music, and the work of Stars of the Lid in general like 'The Ballasted Orchestra'. Released in 1…
Swim
Following on from 2008's Polaris Prize-winning Andorra, Dan Snaith returns with a fresh take on the Caribou sound, working more dance-friendly structures into his work, which makes for quite a revelation given the project's tendencies towards jazz and frayed-edge psychedelia. Snaith outlined his approach to the new record by stating: "I got excited by the idea of making dance music that's liquid in the way it flows back and forth, the sounds slosh around in pitch, timbre, pan... Dance mus…
Tidings / Amethyst Waves
Mark McGuire has been a member of triadic mega-unit Emeralds since their inception. Besides contributing to their ever growing catalogue, he's also worked with Daniel "Oneohtrix Point Never" Lopatin as Skyramp and a prolific number of other solo projects. His most recent album for Weird Forest (originally released on Cassette by the Wagon label) has been hailed as his most definitive to date, crossing astral lines and psychedelic boundaries between noise squalls, lush-out synth washes and …
Hexadecagon
The Octopus Project as a performance piece meant to bring the audience into a world of total sound and image submersion, Hexadecagon is now an album. The special vinyl version of the album is a bit complicated, so I’ll let the band explain: “The vinyl is a gatefold double LP spanning three sides. The fourth contains several unique tracks unavailable on any other format, interlaced in concentric spiraling “roulette grooves,” so that the listener never knows which track they’ll get when they pu…
Life (...It eats you up)
Whereas previous works by Mika Vainio have utilised guitar Life (… It Eats You Up) is the first to use the instrument as its primary sound source. A fascinating, sometimes disturbing and deeply personal work this new 10 track set bears all the hallmarks (exacting attention to detail of tone, rhythm and texture) of Vainio's previous works with some stunning surprises, such as his cover version of The Stooges' 'Open Up and Bleed'.Tracks such as ‘Mining’ hark bark to the banging beat exces…
Second Original Silence
Thurston Moore, Jim O'Rourke and Mats Gustafsson last convened for the monumentally noisy Diskaholics Anonymous LP, Weapons of Ass Destruction. Now the trio have returned to Smalltown Superjazz for yet more sonic carnage, this time joined by ace drummer Paal Nilssen-Love, guitarist Terrie Ex and bassist Massimo Pupillo. There's a tremendous breadth to the kind of ground covered by these musicians. At no point do you feel as if the ensemble is running out of ideas or stagnating on one particular …
\"The Vodoun Effect\" 1972-1975
Most Likely To: be one of the only albums you hear that will protect you from the smallpox virus. In the late 1960s, as traditional African culture rubbed up against an influx of Western influences, some of the most amazing modern musical forms birthed in the dance halls of West Africa. Rhythm and blues, soul, and funk elements electrified and popularized in the United States folded back upon themselves into their African origins. Afrobeat reigned supreme in Nigeria, a defiant and jubilant funk …
Mimikry
Having nicely set up the release of this album with their Ret Marut Handshake EP a few months back, Alva Noto and Blixa Bargeld (of Einsturzende Neubauten fame) deliver a set that exceeds all expectations. One of the most strikingly obvious comparisons to arise from that first batch of material was the Alan Vega/Pan Sonic collaboration, yet Mimikry goes much further than combining the established aesthetics of its constituent parts and creates something that actually feels very new. Car…
Reverse Atheism
Barbara Manning and S. Glass lead a small army of guest readers and musicians through barely musical versions of tunes, texts, and tracts. A survey of the exceptional, the eccentric, the feverish, and the pathologically peculiar within popular religious faith, to paraphrase William James, made by others, communicated by tradition, determined to fixed forms by imitation, and retained by habit. 70+ minutes of music fragments leached of melody and harmony, looped, hacked, noisified and depas…
La Barca
Very Special double vinyl edition of Thomas Koner's 'La Barca' album - featuring a whole extra side/over 20 minutes of exclusive material never before available on any format, cut at Berlin's Dubplates and Mastering and pressed up in an edition of just 500 copies for the world. If you're a follower of Drone/Dark Ambient, and have admired the work of anyone from Deathprod to Rhythm & Sound to BJ Nilsen to Chris Watson to Angelo Badalamenti - this will blow your mind* There are few artists …
Allegory Of Allergies
RESTOCKED! april 2009 release: deluxe reissue of emeralds long o/p august 2007 gods of tundra tape, a production-value-heavy edition consisting of two lps (each in their own metallic-ink inner sleeve) housed inside a full-color stoughton gatefold sleeve ; yowza ...for many the original cassette release was the one that made emeralds’ unique combination of stasis-heavy analogue synth wave-shifting stick (certainly was the one that “did it” for me) ; this majestic record-object does everything to …
Family Perfume Vol. 1 & 2
Fuck Nostalgia. Live the truth. Truth is feeling, Truth is sound, Truth is motion. I am believing. I am seeing. I am moving. TRUTH IS FOREVER. Meet The Presley/ White Fence Truth Serum. Imagine if you will, that your uncle frank, aunt jane and cousing ricky all made out with George Harrison at the same time and felt good about it. Thats what the family perfume smells like. Like the real shit. This aint your regular mutton chop rock. This is freak your fucking mom out cause she caught you n…
Mali: essential recordings of Carnatic bamboo flute (1969-1970)
Gorgeous double gatefold issue of two crucial albums by "the greatest living flutist of South India", T.R. Malingham or Mali to millions of South Indians, presented in respectfully opulent stye by Japan's EM reissue imprint. This is meditative, spiritual, and exotic music of the highest order, combining his two most revered recordings from 1969 and 1970 over two very special discs. Mali is said to be able to commune with birds via his playing and that's quite understabable. His virtuoso u…
Drums Between The Bells
Gatefold 2LP version. "Pairing prickly electronics with live drum patterns, Eno dumps great globs of blotchy machine -- malfunction into the mix. Holland's poetry is interlaced courtesy of [a] monotone voice...the combined effect makes the whole undertaking sound like a wild William Gibson fantasy come to life." --Pitchfork "Brian Eno first came across the work of Rick Holland in the late '90s during the Map-Making project; a series of collaborative works between students of the Royal College, t…
A Double Promo Album By CAN
Vocalist Damo Suzuki’s departure from CAN in 1973 had forced the band to re-evaluate their sound. Now with Michael Karoli and Irmin Schmidt sharing vocal duties, the band had also begun drawing on influences from disco and glam. While still remaining staunchly outside the mainstream, they undoubtedly became more accessible to a wider audience, and soon had a huge fan base in the UK. In fact, just a few months after playing the live show found on this double LP (recorded in Lyon in January …
Bag It
double Vinyl edition with additional tracks: The Thing with Mats Gustafsson, Ingebrigt Haaker-Flaten and Paal Nilssen-Love covering 54 Nude Honeys, The Ex, Duke Ellington and Albert Ayler, intense modern improv. Swedish reed-chewer Mats Gustafsson is probably bored to tears by now by the Brötzmann comparisons that so regularly greet his work with the Thing. Even so, the elder German icon remains a central pillar of reference, most noticeably through a gnarled horn language that balances mach…
Kill For Love
16 Track Deluxe Double LP on Magenta coloured wax finally available, includes downloiad code redeemable from the label* At long last available for public consumption - Johnny Jewel and co make their loooong overdue return with a gorgeous new album. It's now five years since 'Night Drive' triggered an avalanche of copy-cats and even a film - Nicolas Winding Refn's 'Drive' - and although we were all blessed with Johnny Jewel's sumptuous 'Symmetry, Themes for an Imaginary Film' earlier this…