Death Is Certain
Across two 7”s, Death Or Glory (1982) and Death Rocks (1983) and one 12”, Anguish (1982) Jimmy Smack carved his own bleak chasm amidst the LA Death Rock scene that he inhabited. After decades dormant in the crypt, Knekelhuis finally compiles Smack’s full recorded output, providing it a lavish place to rest on the Death Is Certain LP. While his local punk contemporaries pursued aggressive hardcore and political punk, Jimmy Smack donned corpse paint (before it would later become synonymous with th…
Mr. Manager (Expanded Edition)
Following the acclaimed 2017 vinyl reissue of the Noir et Blanc album, we’re excited to present a special edition of Zazou Bikaye’s second record, Mr. Manager, which only ever came out on vinyl, in 1985. This edition comprises nine additional tracks, including six previously-unreleased recordings, and three which were only included on limited-edition singles. Stemming from the encounter between Congolese vocalist/composer Bony Bikaye, French musician/producer Hector Zazou and modular synth wizar…
A Touch Of Grey
The power trio Mirande/English/Skinner has dug out a strangely lit tunnel between the dustier nooks and crannies of the rich and varied 1980’s industrial scene and the just as elusively defined experimental field of today where they themselves reside. While it certainly reeks S*Core, Illusion Of Safety and whathaveyou, their very own fingerprints are all over the place, freshening things up. An out-of-time album we are very pleased to offer!
Batang Frisco
Founded by Eric Jensen & the late Bill DiMichele (RIP), the lifespan of San Francisco based project Batang Frisco (‘San Francisco Kids’ in the Filipino dialect Tagalog) is inimitably distilled on this solitary self-titled record, an outlandish private press pearl of homespun minimal synth music.Recorded over the course of 1985/6 and self-released in 1986, the one and only Batang Frisco LP was the product of an inconspicuous DIY existence spent in the margins of the Bay Area scene in the 1980s. C…
Kollaps
*Reissue of the 1981 album, originally released on Zickzack* "Einstürzende Neubauten's first studio record. They established themselves as relentless and pioneering right out of the gate, bringing power tools and metallic percussion into the mix in a never before seen way. This album is more consistent than a lot of their later records, and the standard is very high across the record, but it's still very much a band finding themselves. You can feel the members doing something awesome, but you c…
Fuenf Auf Der Nach Oben Offenen Richterskala
*Reissue of the 1987 album, originally released on What's so funny.* "Like watching a stalker cleverly follow its prey for miles, only to watch it shy away just short of lodging a knife into the back of the followed, Fünf Auf der Nach Oben Offenen Richterskala (Five on the Open-Ended Richter-Scale) is Einstürzende Neubauten at their unsettling, gripping, and tension-ridden best. It was also the group's most subdued and measured work to that point, organic dark ambient that rarely utilized the ch…
Issue 74: Telex - The Original Eurovisionaries (Magazine + 7")
This month's Electronic Sound cover story details the highly entertaining exploits of Telex, the maverick Belgian trio whose early synthpop records were a major influence on the American and European club scenes that followed a decade or so later. And to accompany the magazine, we have an exclusive yellow vinyl seven-inch boasting two of the band's best-known tracks.
Esperanto (LP)
CD version. Wewantsounds continues their Ryuichi Sakamoto reissue series with the release of the 1985 album Esperanto, composed for a performance by New York avant-garde choreographer Molissa Fenley. Produced and performed by Sakamoto with contribution by Arto Lindsay and Japanese percussionist Yas-Kaz, Esperanto is a fascinating instrumental work mixing electronica, ambient and synth pop. Released in Japan in 1985 on Midi Inc.s' School label, the album has never been released outside of Japan u…
Tape Music 1980-1984
Since the early 1980s the Eureka, California based duo Psyclones freak out in music. As one of the most long-standing DIY duos, Brian Ladd and Julie Frith created a body of work, that flirts with Ambient, experimental industrial sounds, New Wave, Post-Punk, Synth-Pop, and all that electric jazz. Besides a few hard-to-find vinyl releases, they published their music regularly via cassette tapes on labels like their own imprint Ladd-Frith or other famed 1980's underground tape labels like Cause And…
The Amygdala Expedition
A truly stunning masterstroke with almost no equivalent, "The Amygdala Expedition", by the Hungarian musician and musicologist, László Hortobágyi, weaves a singular world of myth and imagination at the boundaries of New Age, Ambient, experimental, and ethnographic music. Drawn from a body of work that first began to emerge during the late '80s and early '90s, it's issued in a very limited edition of 250 copies on 180g Vinyl that's not to be missed.
La Ola Interior - Spanish Ambient & Acid Exoticism 1983-1990
Following “La Contra Ola” (BJR015), Bongo Joe is pleased to present La Ola Interior, a compilation exploring the ambient side of the Spanish electronic music produced in the 80’s. It gathers musicians from various horizons and of many generations, who shared the desire to create an immersive soundscape and to combine electronic music with non-Western musical traditions. As a general rule, the Anglo-Saxon tropism did relate the spanish peninsula’s ambient music to the Balearic Sound, that is to s…
Hidari Ude No Yume
Ryuichi Sakamoto's third solo album "Hidari Ude No Yume" (Left Handed Dream) was originally released in 1981 on the Alfa label. Save for a small-scale Dutch vinyl release in 1981, it is the first time the album's original Japanese edition is released outside of Japan (the European release on Epic Records included significantly different tracks and mixes). Newly remastered from the original tapes by renowned engineer Bernie Grundman, this LP edition comes with original artwork featuring a striki…
Fauli Til Dauli
Tip! - Daily Fauli was the rare minimal synth project of Danish artist Søren Fauli. In 1983, he released one album entitled Fauli Til Dauli on a small label called Gry Records. Søren was nineteen when he recorded this masterpiece and had no prior musical training. He had been playing in punk bands as a teenager and decided to break off to make a solo record. With access to stolen equipment, mainly synthesizers, he wrote these songs very spontaneously and recorded them in a period of one week. He…
Ze
Fortuna Records return with an exceptional reissue of a mid-80s early electronica LP by keyboardist Raviv Gazit. The album was composed entirely on the Synclavier synthesizer in the basement of the Tel-Aviv University in 1985. Gazit was ahead of his time composing cold yet blissful electronic music for film and theatre which he later released as an album. An unexpected yet extremely welcome addition to Fortuna's killer catalog.
Baila, Claridad!
**300 copies** Discómanos Records release Alberto Garralón's Baila, Claridad!, a cassette the Spanish guitar player and producer made 30 years ago. Large doses of imagination, passion, and heart, with influences of contemporary classical music on the strings, pianos, and winds and also a folk touch on the guitars with a mix of ethnic music in his percussions. All of these elements made Baila, Claridad! the first work in Garralón's career a unique collector's piece of the famous Spanish movement,…
The Early Days
Early Days maps out Nine Circles interpretation of Cold Wave and Minimal Synth. Unbelievably the tracks are mostly from a brief time period, ’80—’82. Alienation and uncertainty course through the 2LP with heavy Yamaha chords, metallic machine beats and brittle vocals.Nine circles was formed in the early '80s by Peter Van Garderen and Lidia Fiala. In 1980 there was a band called Genetic Factor. This band split up when their three members got girlfriends and they started to make music together wit…
America Invertida
LP version. Synth ambiences, acoustic landscapes, deep songwriting, and subtle candombe percussions combine in most of the musical output released in Uruguay during the '80s. A very unique sound was developed within the narrow boundaries of Montevideo, the country's capital city, by just a small group of very talented artists. These sounds reverberated in singer-songwriting (Eduardo Darnauchans, Fernando Cabrera, Estela Magnone), jazz fusion approximations (Hugo Fattoruso's La Escuelita), experi…
School Daze
Dark Entries and Honey Soundsystem have teamed up to release the gay porn soundtrack work of San Francisco-based musician and producer, Patrick Cowley. Perhaps one of the most revolutionary and influential people in the cannon of disco music, Cowley created his own brand of Hi-NRG dance music coined “The San Francisco Sound.” Born in Buffalo, NY on October 19, 1950, Patrick moved to San Francisco at the age of 21. He studied at the City College of San Francisco where he founded the Electronic Mu…
Radiated Falling. Obscure Tape Music of Japan vol. 11
Mamoru Fujieda is a Japanese post-minimalist composer, and Edition Omega Point releases some of his work from the early '80s. Both "Radiated Falling" (1980) and "The Art Of Fugue" (1981) are tape compositions in which sound materials of a prepared piano are electronically-processed and modulated in various ways. "Radiated Falling" is based on "Falling Scale No. 2" for piano (1975). The series of works entitled "Falling Scale" are composed almost entirely of descending scales as their stru…
Pardon me for barging in like this
Limited edition of 600 copies including 16 page book This boxed vinyl set is a treasure trove of rare and out of print noise from the vaults of the legendary early 80’s M.Squared label in Sydney Australia. M-Squared has been probably the best-known independent-label in the late 70’s early 80’s also famous for their incredible rare and sought after Vinyl-Releases of Makers of Dead Travel Fast, Systematics, Scattered Order or SPK. The heavy Box features previously unreleased tracks from Scattered…