New Arrivals
Lonely women's club
Beautiful new work from Lawrence English. Pressed in an edition of 500 copies. Somewhere after dark, before dawn, in a place where natural light is shunned and organ is singing. It's voice is that of an arcing clouds of tone, emerging and falling with an uneasy sense of pace and direction. The voice warbles, a vibrato of shifting pulse and subtle variation. The room around it is filled with a dusty ash; smoke in haze like proportions. Eyes are blood shot, sunken below the rim of a glass. …
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 …
Sequitur
Emeralds co-pilot Steve Hauschildt follows up his 'Tragedy & Geometry' album for Kranky with the plush new age disco dreamscapes of 'Sequitur'. Arguably, Steve is the lazy one in Emeralds, conjuring only three solo album to date compared with the gazillion respective works from bandmates John Elliot and Mark McGuire. But, as evidenced here and previously, he's also the canniest and most pop-wise, honing a more concise, richly rhythmic and melodic style of composition still rooted in cereb…
Trente belles annes
Triumphal new CD, the first new recordings in an age, from one of the greatest bands on the goddamn planet, the trio of saxophonists Jim Sauter and Don Dietrich and guitarist Donald Miller aka Borbetomagus: this is a roof-raising performance, recorded live at Instants Chavires, France, 19th December 2009. Borbetomagus combine the elevated amplifier violence of Jimi Hendrix at his most combustible with the spontaneous free music polyphony of Ascension-era Coltrane and the ‘guitar smashing’ h…
Benji
Mark Kozelek is back with a new Sun Kil Moon album featuring Sonic Youth's Steve Shelley, Jen Wood (who has worked with the Postal Service), Will Oldham, and Owen Ashworth (formerly known as Casiotone for the Painfully Alone, now of Advance Base).
Orilla Oscura
Heavyweight, tip-on style gatefold jacket printed on uncoated Stoughton stock includes download code redeemable from the label. Vinyl mastered by Lupo at D&M** In swift succession to his excellent Vallens 12", Barn Owl Jon Porras presents his third solo side under his birth name. Inspired by a book on the San Francisco Tape Music Centre, Jon creates expansive atmospheres from slowed down tape manipulated with analogue FX to complement the hazy grain and shapes of his signature, plangent g…
Peripheral
*nice Price * Peripheral is the fresh new effort by Airchamber3 and marks a step forward from their debut. The improvisational element is still central in their compositional method, but Peripheral (recorded in a period of four years) shows how the trio, occasionally augmented by some additional musicians - Vincenzo Vasi (Patton/Capossela), Dominic Cramp (Carla Bozulich), Barbara De Dominicis, Luminance Ratio - has been able to integrate elements of different genres maintaining an experimental e…
Mika Vainio-Haswell & Hecker remixes
Popol Vuh's soundtrack work for the films of Werner Herzog in 1970's and 1980's are some of the most stunning in the field. Editions Mego is pleased to present two re-workings of classic Vuh tracks. Mika Vainio takes 'Nachts: Schnee' from the 1987 soundtrack 'Cobra Verde', and delivers a skillfully constructed ambient piece of beauty, which shifts and turns over 10 minutes. Haswell & Hecker turn the majestic 'Aguirre' from the 1972 soundtrack 'Aguirre - The Wrath Of God' into possibly the first …
Requiem for a baby grand
Final piano music for 8 hands and tools. A film by Pavel Borodin documenting the performance by Hans W. Koch, Thomas Lehn, Ben Patterson and Jozef Cseres.
Rework: Philip Glass Remixed
There are two basic reasons why composers like Philip Glass end up getting remixed: rhythm and repetition. Glass' most identifiable music is simple, or so it seems: Play a chord, break it down into its constituent notes, and repeat the notes in hypnotic succession. If there's another instrument playing, they're probably playing the same notes in a different order. At the foundation of the music, there's what's called an ostinato. One way to think of it is as a bassline; another, in the words of …
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…
Versions
Grandly orchestrated versions of highlights from the Zola Jesus back catalogue, arranged by none other than classically trained industrial survivor JG Thirlwell (aka Foetus, aka Manorexia). Conceived for a performance at New York’s Guggenheim Museum at the climax of her Conatus world tour, these tremulous string settings are really what Nika Roza Danilova’s tender but polished vocals have always been begging for, and the sensitivity and focus of Thirlwell’s charts, beautifully realised by the Mi…
Sins of omission
A mutating web of feedback, choral echoes and lo-fi loops of various squeaking, rattling found sounds, settling gently into certain texture combinations before teasing the stasis through jolts of pitch bend or slow fades into somewhere else. It's a real nightmare collage: one minute it's a blast of screaming electronics, like someone tampering with the cockpit controls, and the next it's tornado of factory noise and alien sex. Musique concrete for the mind's darker, more paranoid recesses, with …
Unroof the house of the fishes
Long-awaited vinyl LP reissue of Unroof The House Of The Fishes by Key Ransone's Small Cruel Party. Originally released in 1993 as a limited to 50 copies tape on the Japan-based G.R.O.S.S label run by Akifumi Nakajima. Aube but now upgraded to vinyl by UK label Harbinger Sound. Mastered for vinyl by Scott Konzelmann of Chop Shop 'fame'. The LP is housed in a printed inner sleeve, along with a full-colour jacket, both featuring new artwork by the artist. Side A is a creeped contortion of ambient …
Between Strangers
'Between Strangers' is Sohrab's first physical follow-up to his widely received debut LP, 'A Hidden Place' (2010), and burrows further into that same lonely, displaced headspace. There is a dramatic melancholy and underlying rage to both pieces which can't be ignored, making for deeply compelling listening. The A-side in particular uses lo-fi recording of "Voice of a burnt generation" attributed enigmatically to "Hani", recorded in the Eissenhutenstadt refugee camp, Germany to great effect, plac…
Cut
Awesome new recordings from percussionist Chris Corsano using a single drum set augmented by various re-purposed metal objects, modified reed instruments and bowed strings stretched across drums."This all-acoustic solo outing--no electronics or overdubs--more or less further develops what Chris Corsano started on his 2006 recording, The Young Cricketer: one drum set augmented by various re-purposed metal objects, modified reed instruments and bowed strings stretched across drums. 43 minutes/19 t…
Music(S)
Music(s) is the intimist portrait of Japanese composer Otomo Yoshihide.Music(s) is the intimist portrait of Japanese composer Otomo Yoshihide.In 1990, he founded the mythic group 'Ground Zero' produced by John Zorn, and is one of the major players on the current Japanese scene. An adept of free jazz and noisy music, he travels around the globe with his various jazz ensembles as well as solo on guitar or with his astonishing turntables. This double DVD presents a talented artist through th…
DNA on DNA
Limited edition 2LP version featuring newly-discovered songs exclusive to this LP: "Pompeii," "Shrinking Thing," "Drinking Water," plus two encores from DNA's final performance at CBGB's. Housed in a gatefold sleeve. New York's seminal no wave band, DNA, makes it's highly anticipated American CD debut with this definitive collection of studio and live recordings. Surviving two line-ups over a brief period of four years; this highly influential, strikingly original and extremely under-re…
The Ecstatic Exchange
A rare chance to hear Daniel Abdal-Hayy Moore reading (and accompanying himself on zither) from his classic collection of shamanic poetry ‘Dawn Visions’, originally published by City Lights back in 1964, when the author was in his early twenties. The poems were written during explorations of mind and space in Mexico and California. As Moore describes it, a period of “immersion on the ocean of poetic inspiration, my near drowning in a sudden flood of imagery and pushing further and further, almos…
Stargazer
Janina Angel Bath’s voice feels like celestial nectar dripping from astral spheres ready to awaken the inner kundalini serpent from its slumber. With Hands of Hydra on sitar this is a deep eastern psychedelic meditation with slow motion tambura strings unfolding universal consciousness. 100 copies.