New Arrivals
Medusa’s Lair
Filleted over two sides of wax, here we have a rare meet up of three of the brightest lights in the Twin Cities’ musical orbit. On March 21, 2009, PAUL METZGER—best known for his transcendental gypsy raga guitar and banjo meditations—jumped in the ring with percussionist DAVU SERU and veteran multi-instrumentalist MILO FINE for an evening of uncompromising spontaneous composition. Medusa’s Lair is stunning, inscrutably wily, living music. One-time edition of 300 LPs pressed on 180-gram virgin vi…
ladybird labyrinth
orphan fairytale is the solo monniker of eva van deuren, member of the lady folk troupe MASKESMACHINE, who started blowing my mind 12 years ago as a street performance troupe in antwerp. besides my own ladyfriend, i don't think i know anyone better than eva, and her boyfriend (audiobot madman) carlo steegen. for some reason this makes it even more difficult to write a decent description for this record, we live in the same mansion, and i could write a lot of stories about doing the dishes togeth…
Teeth Mountain
Driven primarily by neo-tribal drums, which would seemingly put them in league with the rumbling sound of Bmore's Thank You. But "12 Plus Harsh Tanz" in particular is much more reflective. The guitar brings to mind the cracked post-1960s dream-psyche hangover of Pink Floyd, I'm thinking here of an instrumental interlude that might have been on Obscured by Clouds, or perhaps the contemporaneous Eastern-infused lines of Popul Vuh's Daniel Fichelscher. It's headspace music, to be sure, but in some …
Another Dull Dawn
When Chris Corsano turned 6 years old, I already begged him on my wounded knees to record an LP for Ultra eczema. He played it cool, was clearly annoyed but remained polite. From then on (he is now 46) I would email him the same question daily. I slept in a tent in front of his house, sent him letters every week, had all his different cell phone numbers, I even gave him new clothes, though he kept wearing his fully blue outfit. Much like Michael Jackson, corsano, the last drummer on earth, alway…
Musica acouscousmatica
Sebastien Borgo, Alan Courtis, Frank De Quengo, Nicolas Marmin are L’autopsie and they just discovered the Musique Acouscousmatique as you will see on the poster inside the LP. Anyway here’s another great mix of post-industrial and shamanistic noises cut into 41 tracks. 200 copies art edition LP with stamped labels and sleeve, poster and inserts. “L'autopsie a révélé que la mort était due à l'autopsie is a musical projet that started back in 2007. The four musicians of L'autopsie... were first g…
Plague Of Fantasies
Brand new solo material from Aidan Baker, one of the most prolific musicians recording at the moment, Aidan creates such a wide array of musical sound its hard to keep track, not only does he perform as part of the fantastic Nadja, as well as in projects such as ARC, and collaborating with other luminaries such as Tim Hecker, he releases a whole host of solo material. This new solo record is really something, pulling together all the genres he works in, fusing heavy drones, with broken drums bea…
Entertaining Physics
Poland's mik.musik agent wojt3k kucharczyk bugged his robotron family. "entertaining physics" is a poetic and secretful electroacoustic work that sounds like a gathering of digital clocks in the waiting room of an abandoned building. mechanical ants are crawling over piles of paper next to protesting copy machines and sadly shaking faxes. quiet industrial diseases spread in the attic and the doors clap in a-synchronicity. in between, interplanetary melodies are humming in retired telephones. all…
Sun Circle
The most recent release on the lichen label; all releases are hand-assembled by zach wallace in his native ann arbor environs and offer of a lovely wave of art-sound, field recordings, improvisation with natural non-instruments, and, in the case of this particular title, a pair of pieces by greg davis and zach himself on farfisa, distorted vocals, and bells. the first appears to be a zonked “cover” of lamonte young’s “31 vii 69 10:26 - 10:49 pm munich from map of 49's dream the two systems of el…
Ancestral star
Finally reprinted...Returning with a brand new album of arid, dustbowl blues and slow-motion desert-scapes, Evan Caminiti and Jon Porras resume duties as Barn Owl for a third album. Previously this band has tended to court associations with the sound developed by Earth for their Hex album; the overall effect is resolutely bleak and doom-laden, yet not entirely without some grounding in the language of grassroots Americana. Ancestral Star takes the Barn Owl sound to a new level of refinement, spe…
Basement Recordings 1978-1982
A while ago one of the members of the youngest antwerp based free jazz band SHELDON SIEGEL (all 16 year olds..) visited me, I had just met them and he wanted to come by to get some records. We spoke about free jazz for a while, then he said the magical words "My dad use to play free jazz in the 70's as well".. I was like "ow, and if that was in antwerp, was it with WIM?", he said "Yes yes, he's on one of their tapes with Fred Van Hove, Ivo Van Der Borght etc". My heartbeat went a little faster, …
Flammende Herzen
Michael Rother (half of the influential Krautrock group Neu! and a founding member of Kraftwerk and Harmonia) recorded this first solo album with producer Conny Plank in 1976. Rother's signature guitar sound, the mechanical percussion (Jaki Liebezeit of Can) and the simple yet outerworldly anthemic melodies make Flammende Herzen an outstanding and visionary record."Finally reissued on vinyl, this is the 1976 solo debut from from Neu!/Harmonia guitarist Michael Rother. This would be the fir…
Egypt Strut
Decades before his time, political and musical revolutionary, Sun Ra, developed a new plane of cultural existence where black people were all-powerful beings from outer space, sending their intergalactic message through jazz music. Recorded live in 1975 at Cleveland's legendary jazz club, the Smiling Dog Saloon, when Sun Ra and his Arkestra descended on the city for a week-long residency. You can imagine how the uninitiated's jaw must have dropped when Ra and his 15 musicians marched out onto th…
Asleep On The Floodplain
Ben Chasny has spent many years at this point perfecting his very personal vision of the American landscape. With his early LPs he managed to grab a groundswell of support for his distinctly lo-fi recordings, and since hitting the Drag City label with the breathtaking 'School of Flower' he has managed to extend his vision to countless others. 'Asleep on the Floodplain' continues his exploration, and while it doesn't change up the formula too much (apart from the odd analogue synth blurt here and…
The sacrifice for the music became our lifestyle
Chris Abrahams, upright piano. Kai Fagaschinski, b-flat clarinet. Cover painting & sleeve design by Zev Langer. How do you run a duo when both of its protagonists are living at two opposite ends of the planet ? Well, it's not that dramatic. For many years Chris has used his European tours as a springboard for extended stays in Kai's hometown of choice, Berlin. After appreciating each other's work for quite a while they began collaborating at a friend's piano-armed kitchen in 2007. While C…
The Divine
""the divine" marks the second phase in the trilogy proposed by john twells aka xela. crawling out of a castle dungeon in pursuit of its predecessor, "the illuminated", this lp finds itself trapped in an abandoned church somewhere in a damp southern wilderness. church bells chime and rattle through the record's first piece, echoing and distorting through a fog of chattering voices and prayers. tape loops stumble over tape loops and the solemn, ecclesiastical drone slowly decomposes into thick, c…
Belles Betes
“Belles Betes” features 4 new tracks fuzzed-out heaviness. The track ‘Green & Cold’ is currently streamable from Nadja’s MySpace page, and it sounds awesome - dark and brooding yet subtly melodic. Like most Nadja releases, “Belles Betes” is annoyingly limited. It’s being released as an LP and will be limited to 500 copies. Click the Beta-lactam link below for samples from each track and additional album info.
BloodLinks + SacredPlaces
Poet Laureate of East St. Louis+founder/editor of internationally acclaimed journal "Drum Voices Revue". Principal architect of black cultural arts movement of the 60s, teacher & acclaimed writer of countless volumes of poetry, Redmond has been called "the preacher of poetic rhythm" by Maya Angelou, "a carver of high song magic" by Quincy Troupe & "a worker & healer" by Ishmael Reed. On this spirited, funky, streetwise collection of 12 vintage cuts recorded live in the studio in Sacramento in 19…
Vigils
Wierd Records is proud to announce the release of a vinyl edition of Xeno & Oaklander's Vigils EP, originally self-released by the band as a limited edition CDR in 2006, here remastered with a previously unavailable bonus track. Merging the cold, cinematic aesthetics of artist Liz Wendelbo with the architectural exactitude of Sean McBride (a.k.a. Martial Canterel), Xeno & Oaklander have been the sharpest spearheads of twenty-first-century minimal synth since their formation in 2004. Using analog…
Absent Coast
Another sublime drone album from the unshakably good Root Strata camp, En's The Absent Coast is a real upper tier ambient release. Distinguished by its depth and effortless musicality, this album is one for genre fans to really savour. After the sandblasting noise/tonal onslaught of 'A Dying Sun/Return To Holyoke', the album calibrates itself to a stately simmer that comes to life during the quite sublime 'Honeysuckle Heart', which combines glassy sustains with crackl…
Forever Falling Toward The Sky
Forever Falling Toward the Sky is the first ever release by Bay Area based Vestals, AKA Lisa McGee. A taught set of haunting electric ballads, these five tracks weave together a number of layered guitars and vocals into a smokey tapestry of blown electricity. Rather than the ephemeral drones McGee has been involved with recently, most notably the group-mind ensemble Portraits & the duo Higuma, Vestals retains the clarity of song, with these hypnotic gyms having been slowly carved out over…