New Arrivals
A Bureaucratic Desire for Extra-Capsular Extraction
A Bureaucratic Desire for Extra-Capsular Extraction gathers all of the music drone metal progenitors Earth recorded in October 1990, during their earliest sessions at Portland's Smegma Studios. Earth, featuring soon-to-be Melvin Joe Preston in its second lineup, intended for those seven tracks to serve as its debut. Record label decisions interfered. Three of those tracks were released a year later via Sub Pop, on the out-of-print EP Extra-Capsular Extraction; four more were released…
Beeswax Ephemera
The Preservation label presents Beeswax Ephemera from Iowa City guitarist Evan Miller. With one eye on the future and one on the past, his playing has considerable technical and abstract expanse, though retains a wonderful melodic sensibility upfront. Evan’s experimental leanings give Beeswax Ephemera an idiosyncratic quality that mark an inventive new talent in the world of artists taking guitar music into exciting new directions. These nominally earthy compositions take flight with the undenia…
Live at café Oto
The Ex guitars meet Nilssen-Love & Vandermark duo. Lean Left throws together two explosive duos - the sax-drums collision course of Ken Vandermark and Paal Nilsson-Love with the piledriving guitarists from The Ex - to make up a positively apocalyptic quartet: an elemental musical force featuring Grade A international players zoning in and scrambling together rock, jazz, noise and blistering free improv into a highly-charged onstage assault, each member taking their sounds and bodies to th…
Hyste
A sequence of six duo improvisations on tenor saxophone & church organ recorded at St Peter’s, Whitstable in 2009.
Transient Places
Music in the here and now. An event in an everyday situation. A connecting link between actual occurrences and the deepest depths of one's inner world. A balancing act between total control and the inexplicable. An acoustic journey through the present. It is with his ears that Luigi Archetti journeys into the guitar's pick-up, to the limits of the audible. He hears, listens and gathers until he has a whole depot of sounds at his disposal, which he then processes by structured planning or b…
Synesthesia
3rd release from duo of Rob Mazurek (ISOTOPE 217)+Chad Taylor (SAM PREKOP BAND) is a stark departure from the sound cultivated on their last LP. Utilizing electronics, found sounds, moog & studio manipulations they have made not just a jazz record but one that defies categorization in any particular genre. With assistance of studio engineer JOHN McENTIRE they overdubbed, dissected & reassembled a selection of recorded & found sounds making a record that is not only very listenable but is …
Stone Circle
RESTOCKED! 10/10 on Foxy Digitalis, writing "best psych album of the year! Maybe even best psych album ever?! “Stone Circle” deserves much more than a measly ten stars!”. Wood-land have released a few bits and bobs on the Install label but i'm totally unfamiliar with their work. 'Stone circle' is the duo's first full length release, limited to a super small run of 100 copies. On first listen i reckon it's total winner. Twenty tracks of brooding lo-fi instrumentation that sounds like it was recor…
Umbra
"Umbra was recorded in 2010 in Barcelona. I used a modified AM radio and a home-made oscillator. I found the radio in the street the previous year, discarded outside a huge warehouse full of electronic ‘garbage’. I took it to my studio and modified it using circuit-bending techniques. Umbra is comprised of ten short pieces. In most of them I played only the modified AM radio, in others just the oscillator, and in some both.”Juan Matos Capote is an artist from the Canary Islands living in Barcel…
Night maps
Since the release of Saddleback’s acclaimed 2004 debut Everything’s A Love Letter, Tony has found increasing demand for his touch behind the recording desk. Tony’s studio is housed in his Kangaroo Valley residence on the south coast of New South Wales. Found inside are all sorts of instruments including various guitars, percussion makers, horns, a clarinet, a double bass, piano and a specially-fashioned drum set. Having arranged and played these on other peoples’ work – most notably for Sydney’s…
Tetralogy (1978-1982)
'A 2-CD set containing four very different settings all featuring Paul Rutherford (trombone & euphonium): two festival solos - one with electronics and the other without; a festival brass quartet with George Lewis (trombone), Martin Mayes (french horn) & Melvyn Poore (tuba); and a studio trio with Paul Rogers (double bass) & Nigel Morris (drum set). The electronically enhanced solo and the brass quartet are unlike anything else in Rutherford's discography. All previously unissued.'
Harmony Series 11-16
In the 'Harmony Series 11-16', very small events are happening in every nook and cranny of the music, and these subtle changes give magical effects to the music. This is in fact not magic at all - all the events are due to the theoretical structure of the music, but the way Pisaro incorporates them into his compositions is so subtle and natural, that the whole impression on his music becomes poetic. When I listen to each piece while carefully paying attention to the details, I feel that the nuan…
Natsu No Sebone
Alto saxophonist Masayoshi Urabe and percussionist Toshi Ishizuka recorded this extended improvisation at Tokyo's Apia Club, quietly ferocious music with a unique physicality. "Thrilling, blood-shaking, soul-scraping and defiantly non-sexless improv set from two Japanese titans. Recorded live at the Apia club in Tokyo in December last year, this set showcases Urabe's uniquely physical approach to improvisation -- ferociously concentrated, contorted, sweating and eruptive with physical power. Hi…
Beyond The Purple Star Zone / Oblique Parallax
Two related classic Saturn LP reissues on a single CD, both recorded at the Detroit Jazz Centre - in 1980 and 1981 respectively. They share an excellent sound quality and great playing - there's a classic version of Rocket No.9 and plenty of otherworldly Moog and electronic keyboards - up there with Ra's best on record. Rocket excepted, all the pieces are original to these LPs and don't appear elsewhere (though the first track of Purple is heard again at the end, with another name (exactl…
Golden Worry
"‘Golden Worry’ features new drummer Emmanuel Nicolaidis and is huge step forward from 2008’s ‘Terrible Two’. The band has kept busy touring with Beach House, Celebration, Dan Deacon, Zomes, Battles, Mi Ami, Jason Urick, and Future Islands. The CD version comes in a four panel mini-LP style gatefold package. "
Fenetre ovale
Karl Naegelen and the Risser/Rühl duo share a common interest in the quest for new sounds and sound illusions. Creating a confusion of sources, suggesting various acoustic spaces, evoking the sound of a sewing machine or a hard shoulder, making a rubbing sound sound like breath and making breath sound like creaking, this is the type of urge that stimulated collective research. The grand piano had to become a wind instrument and the clarinet a water instrument ; the pianist had to play per…
Celeste
Another Tompkins Square reissue of early James Blackshaw material, and this is about as early as it gets: Celeste originally surfaced on Celebrate Psi Phenomenon a full five years ago and set the blueprint fr just about every solo recording he's made since. While the first part of the album finds Blackshaw in solo 12-string mode, the second deviates from the well-trodden Takoma-styled path and heads into an effects-laden drone composition. This sort of style-melding approach would come to…
On Patrol
THE WIRE'S BEST OF 2010! CD edition "If a tree falls in a forest and no one's around, shit still gets crushed. If Cameron Stallones holes up solo-style in a suburban cave and wah-riffs over canned bongos for five straight months, double LPs still get dropped. These are basic life laws. The latest from Mr. Araw is easily his least compromising audio self-portrait to date. Three minute rhythm sketches are stretched into ten minute loop pedal odysseys. Organ solos last for entire vinyl sides.…
Planetary Unknown
"It's a great summer for music, with some excellent albums just released - and more reviews to come ... Let's start with the great David S. Ware and his new quartet, a great quartet, with William Parker playing the bass as on all other David S. Ware albums, with Cooper-More on piano instead of Matthew Shipp, and with Muhammad Ali on drums (the latest in a long list, with Susie Ibarra, Guillermo E. Brown, Warren Smith, Whit Dickey, Hamid Drake, ... and quite a phenomenal list at that).It is no do…
The Persistence of Meaning
New York duo of Joshua Convey and Luke Krnkr. Blistering, overdriven shards of noise obscure the almost entirely hidden melodies. These musical moments are few and far between, as The Persistence of Meaning is more about reveling in destruction and decay, emphasizing raw feedback and hollow, rhythmic loops that shamble like the walking dead. Dirges from the deepest ossuaries can almost be heard, pained notes buried by locust swarms of static. While occasionally the pair engage in erratic Krautro…
Prayer Wheel
The Prayer Wheel, like this CDR, spins prayers into the ether. Book of Shadows combines psychedelia, experimental music, and the pursuit of spiritual understanding, all performed together in the eternal present. For the Prayer Wheel release Sharon and Carlton Crutcher are joined by longtime guitarists Aaron Bennack, Jonathan Horne (Plutonium Farmers), and Douglas Ferguson. Also appearing on this release are percussionist Johnny McCollom of the Primordial Undermind, theremin player and fil…