Experimental / Art-Rock

* Temporary nice price * Reissue of a true avantgarde-rock classic: Skeleton Crew were the maverick duo of Ex-Henry Cow guitarist Fred Frith and the great late cellist Tom Cora. Formed during one of Frith's early American residencies, Skeleton Crew was a legendary two man crew who somehow - in real time, managed to play all their instruments, cello, bass, electric guitar, violin, vocals - as well as, drum parts dislocated between the two of them. No one sounded like Skeleton Crew, ever. An unpre…

*2024 stock* Stefan Christensen swamps delicate threads of melody in a muted squall of distortion. Waves of agitated noise, tamped down but still fractious, roll over the structures of his songs, so that it’s hard to tell whether the song or the dissonant scree of sound is the main thing. A current member of Headroom and frequent collaborator with members of Mountain Movers, Alexander and Nagual, Christensen layers haunted sung imagery over slow looped constructions of guitar and percussion. Her…

The final U.S. show, a triumphant and blistering bookend to the storied career of one of the most influential bands in rock music, featuring a unique and expansive eighty-five minute set list that spans Sonic Youth’s nearly three decade catalog. Received an 8.3 Best New Reissue rating from Pitchfork.

Peter Jefferies, a living legend of New Zealand underground music, from his seminal bands Nocturnal Projections and This Kind of Punishment, to his collaborative efforts in bands such as Plagal Grind and Two Foot Flame, is perhaps best known for his solo work on masterpieces such as “The Last Great Challenge in a Dull World” (1990) and “Electricity” (1994), as well as “Elevator Madness” (1996). All of these albums came out on vinyl but one of the best was the singular “Closed Circuit” (2001) whi…

**300 copies** Minimal Wave is proud to present The Sound of Indifference, a rare cassette released in 1981 by Aural Indifference. Aural Indifference was a post-punk studio collective from Sydney, Australia. The two principal members were Brian Spencer Hall (the M Squared in house producer) and Kevin Purdy. The cassette album, The Sound of Indifference, was released in 1981, featuring tracks such as “Theme”, “Park, and “Man Am I Progressive”. Their sound ranges from minimal synth, to post-punk t…

Brighton's Map 71 are a duo comprised of Andy Pyne (percussion, electronics) and Lisa Jayne (words, voice). Together they have been working away at an approach that draws from post-punk, improvisation, electronics, and other such realms of music to create a refreshing environment where reflection, wry observations, the abstract, and immersion can develop. They have existed for a few years now and had several releases out both on their own Foolproof Projects imprint and via a couple of other labe…

Cambridge-based experimental group Contemporary Music Unit was formed in the late 1960s by the guitarist, author and visual artist, Ed Lee, with former student Terry Mortimer on guitar and keyboards. Lee recruited bassist Adrian Kendon, who brought drummer Roger Odell, the latter a powerful foil to Lee’s experimental visions. When Kendon left, Lee assumed bass duties and Odell’s wife Lorraine became a primary vocalist (after the departure of early member Sally Knox), along with teaching comerade…

*300 copies limited edition* Nod invites you to Fly, Fly, Fly with their latest release, the brand new offering from the long-running Rochester, New York-based trio Nod. Equal parts jazz, groove, lo-fi, raw psychedelia, and driving VU-inspired rock, Nod’s 8th full-length release adds some rock grit to the previous Band Room Janitors. This set of fresh experiments from Nod’s laboratory create a new casserole from their ad lib cookbook. So dig in to the new Nod.

*2023 stock. 300 copies lmited release* With over 150 releases under their belt, Tolin Asumer is their first proper US release in almost 20 years. Recorded in Buenos Aires in 2018-2019, and then mixed in 2021, the record opens with Coliso Atomro, an echo-drenched Can-esque excursion into the other-world, with Tomasin taking the role of travel-guide. The use of a bouncing stereo echo-effect mesmerized the listener into a chaotic rock head-nod. The 2nd half of side A features the track Etrol Rene …

Slapp Happy's Anthony Moore, fresh off a year of collaboration with Henry Cow and the simultaneous dissolution of his own group, bounded up from the art-rock/20th century composition underground with this chart-challenging pop set for Virgin. Dropped before its planned release in ‘76, Out is an essential grab from the Britprog cutting room floor! Kicking it off with a tricky asymmetrical keyboard riff reminiscent of Brian Eno’s Tiger Mountain, before rolling into a narrative that unites the mach…

This seminal, eponymous post-punk album by Japanese group Aunt Sally, fronted by experimental singer Phew, was first released by the iconic Vanity Records label in 1979. Over the past forty-plus years, Phew has forged a singular path through a wide range of styles - from free improvisation to pop - and has collaborated with the likes of Ryuichi Sakamoto, members of Can, DAF, Einstürzende Neubauten, The Raincoats and more. But Aunt Sally is where she got her start and, despite the members’ young…

Originally released on Dome (Wire's Bruce Gilbert and Graham Lewis's seminal label), this is an often overlooked milestone in freefrom and artistic post-punk. A siginficant piece of the UK musical puzzle when a lot of artists were shrugging off the previous decade and embracing the DIY attitude of the 1980s.

Listen to Location Location Location’s debut, Damaged Goods, and it’s easy to visualize the three musicians sweating it out in the recording studio, locking in on a groove and just jamming. With, it should be noted, occasional breaks to contemplate the basics, then add subtle overdubs: some bit-crunched guitar here, a marimba there, perhaps a harmonized line or a spacey reverb effect. But essentially live, essentially just three guys in a room, giving their all. But that’s not how it went down a…

We're heading for the dark side of the krautrock kaleidoscope with this month's Electronic Sound cover stars, the inimitable Can. Prompted by the release of 'Live In Stuttgart 1975', the first in a series of archive Can gig recordings, we speak to Irmin Schmidt about the band he created with Michael Karoli, Holger Czukay and Jaki Liebezeit towards the end of the 1960s. As we try to deconstruct their wholly unique brand of sonic voodoo, Schmidt reveals the inner workings of Can, together with his…

**2020 stock** "What about this Cosmofonia Rudimentale? Well, here we have a group of friends who liked to improvise together around 2010 in studio and on stage. The “excuse” was to create a music that could accompany futurist poetry. Roberto Zanisi is a polymorphous musician playing a lot of ethnic string instruments who collaborated between others with Amy Denio, Giovanni Venosta, David Moss, Sainkho Namtchylak and Fabien Guyot. Valerio Scrignoli is an important  guitarist of Italian jazz scen…

'A Face We All Know' breaks new ground altogether. This is a single work with texts by Chris Cutler, Rainald Geotz and Thomas Pynchon and documents the last days of a political nightmare. Start here with Cassiber.

The strangest so far. Mostly songs; a lot of acoustic instruments, a lot of unidentifiable sounds, a lot of fragments borne on a wind from somewhere else; bizarre picking interludes, humour (maybe) and snatches of incandescent playing. You can't pin this one down; it's full of twists and turns and a geometry that doesn't quite add up. Seemingly casual, there's not an ounce of fat on it, and the production - or anti-production - is, on repeated listening, quite extraordinary. Impressive.

The latest collection of twisting, turning instrumentals and songs, and another instant classic. If you didn't venture down this way yet, now is a good time to start. In a category of one, Bob Drake undermines musical, technical and production norms with a breathtaking amalgam of broken rules and unimaginable musical logic.

A set of twisty, forty-ideas-a-minute, niftily arranged, irredeemably eccentric, but strangely brilliant songs that skip blithely across genre borders - from Nashville through the Miskatonic by way of the Beach Boys… even the production values range across the history of recording, sometimes switching inside a single song; so it’s a high-information ride - but still engagingly listenable. So far so good: another crafted, dense, idiosyncratic studio album. Now comes the twist. Finished with his …

A collection of 52 very short songs on uncanny themes, illustrated in the exquisite 24p full-colour booklet with a set of 20 commissioned paintings by Ray O'Bannon. Perhaps the scariest thing is that each of these miniatures is a fully formed, fully orchestrated and complete structure - no lazy snippets here - and Bob Drake plays all the parts with his famously Paganini-esque virtuosity in spooky variable tempo synchrony, packing more ideas and material into 50 seconds than many manage on an ent…

* Edition of 300 * This album has been a slow build over the past eight years, and it is Brian’s first solo release in close to twenty years. The years in between have included a move to the other side of the world (Christchurch to Joshua Tree), and the loss of his brother, who was close in age. This World Just Eats Me Up Alive confronts these topics within Brian’s maelstroms of noise, with his scratchy vocals conveying stories of protagonists living in the gutters of society. It’s a shockingly …

Originally released in 1992, Der Abend Der Schwarzen Folklore is the third Massaker album, originally released by Rough Trade Germany. According to Caspar Brötzmann, the title track and Bass Totem are the band’s most accomplished songs. It’s certainly the most sonicly refined of their albums, recorded during a residency over several weeks at the pastoral site of Conny Plank’s studio near Cologne, and produced by Ingo Krauss and Bruno Gebhard, who had worked with the famed Krautrock producer unti…

Abrasive and challenging, mad, unpredictable, with a wistful, quirky, even humorous side!

A further collection of missing pieces uncovered since the release of the 18 CD Henry Cow Box that fills in parts of the story still undocumented - even on the bootleg circuit. Contents: 1: The earliest and only known stage recording of the band as it was in June 1972 (Martin Ditcham, Fred Frith, John Greaves and Tim Hodgkinson) at the first Glastonbury Fayre. The recording is quite clean, though the mix heavily favours bass and guitar but, in a way, this makes it of special interest, both music…

Tip! HUH are the wild, freeform duo of Kyosuke Terada and Takuma Mori. Based in Tokyo, and playing together since 2007, HUH have released a clutch of cassettes, CD-Rs, and digital albums; they’ve toured Europe (in 2017) and Australia (2019); and they count amongst their collaborators the likes of T Mikawa of Incapacitants, ASTRO, and Government Alpha. You may know Terada from his duo with Shizuo Uchida, MAI MAO, who recently released an LP on An’archives, but he's super prolific, performing solo…

Foam On A Wave is proud to present the first international issue of this chameleonic, shapeshifting record, from one of Hungary's most prolific musician and film composers, János Másik. At times it calls to mind 23 Skidoo, Talking Heads and The Pop Group, at others it sits in its own corner of the room. 1989 was a revolutionary year. For many in the West the fall of the Berlin Wall marked the Autumn of Nations; the End of History and the triumph of progress. In Hungary, the year saw the Round Ta…

Becoming Peter Ivers tells the story of the late Peter Ivers, a virtuosic songwriter and musician whose antics bridged not just 60s counterculture and New Wave music but also film, theater, and music television. Written and recorded in Los Angeles in the mid-to-late-1970s, Becoming Peter Ivers raises the curtain on this mischievous master of ceremonies, who, harmonica in hand, rarely missed a chance to light up an audience. Since his untimely death in 1983, Ivers' short but storied life has been…

Vous et Nous is the ninth album by experimental pop French musician Brigitte Fontaine and the seventh by Areski Belkacem, released in 1977 on the Saravah label. It's an avant-garde double album mixing a variety of instruments and vocal styles, with synthesizer and drum machine on some songs. Other, more acoustic, songs show the Algerian/African influence that Fontaine and Areski were known for. The album was not well understood upon release, but in later years was championed by musicians such as…

**500 copies** Discos Transgénero presents the first ever album by The Manchester Mekon, a group of musicians that were active from the end of the '70s to the beginning of the '80s in Manchester. Influenced by Frank Zappa and the Mothers of Invention, Igor Stravinsky, King Crimson, Maurice Revel and Pink Floyd, the Manchester Mekon aimed to integrate composed and improvised music, blending orchestral and electronic sounds with rock, both live and in the studio. Over a period of five years (1977-…

‘Der Osten Ist Rot’ is a wigged-out 1984 treat helmed by Can’s Holger Czukay, with drums by his legendary bandmate Jaki Liebzeit and vital synth input from Conny Plank.  Now making its first official digital release, the 1984 album was Czukay’s 3rd solo side, proper, following from ‘Movies’ [1979], and ‘On The Way To The Peak Of Normal’ [1981] in pursuit of an elusive, avant and pop-wise spirit that would also be explored on its follow-up ‘Rome Remains Rome’, before Czukay set off on two seminal…

** Limited Edition Color Wax ** Camberwell, in South London, pops up infrequently in pop culture. Perhaps you know it from the Camberwell Carrot, the heroically sized joint smoked in cult movie Withnail & I, or perhaps – if you’re attuned to experimental music – you know of Camberwell Now. The group formed from the ashes of This Heat, the art-noise group whose catalog was reissued on Modern Classics Recordings in early 2016. Not so much a supersession as a continuation of that group, Camberwell …

* Ltd. to 385 copies incl. cdep, silkscreened jacket with obi (orange or yellow), inserts and postcard * With the release of Sweet Inspirations At Muon, the first appearance on vinyl of Tori Kudo’s mythical early ‘80s primitive rock gang Sweet Inspirations, another piece of the seemingly endless puzzle of the Japanese underground has fallen into place. Recorded some time in 1982 at Yokohama venue Muon – precise details are sketchy – we’re now given another chance to discover what was going on in…

Advancing the post-punk infused concoction of blazing garage and art-driven destructs-rock, as established on Hand & Leg's grinding self-titled debut from 2017, the bass and drums are here cranked to new heights of molten activity. Murky shades of sexual negativity plough forth with the help of obsidian distortion, careering bass dirges so scuzzed they can clog arteries, ungodly squalls of paint-stripping noise, and a tendency towards playful rhythmic rituals themselves only offering brief respi…

The unofficial follow-up to the debut album Safe As Milk. These are the original session tapes for the second album, issued as an expanded version entitled The Mirror Man Sessions. Featuring five additional tracks taken from the abandoned tapes.

Anthony Moore’s contribution to the post-punk pre-wave sound of London in 1979 – light with pop, fronted with meta-punk attitude and draped in strings of keyboard theory. As someone else said at the time, The perfect release! A lovely collision of art, pop and punk from the megacenter of all things in the rock and roll era.

Croatia Records presents Angel's Breath by Angel's Breath. Recorded in Sao Paolo and featuring musicians from both Serbia and Brazil, this interesting psychedelic album (originally from 1994) is finally reissued on vinyl.

Tip! *2022 stock* Finally, the album that people have been asking "When in the world is it coming out?". It's a collection of the band's earliest material, mainly live performances from 1980 to just before their major label debut in 1982, including three songs from their first EP 'Ash-Lah'!

This is a really cool post-punk record that manages to be somber at times yet weird and funky too. Very creative! As After Dinner approaches Rock in Opposition through more of a Japanese pop lens, this record does much the same with Krautrock. Of course it doesn't hurt that the musicians Phew is playing with are huge figures from that scene: Holger Czukay, Jaki Liebezeit, and Conny Plank namely. Lots of great drumming, interesting synths, and really whacky bass sounds!

*2022 stock* The world of Doji appears and disappears through the stormy noise like sunlight through a tree... Slap Happy Humphrey is the world's only cover band of noise-tinged Doji Morita, and the world's only cover band of Doji Morita. Folk and noise - at first glance, these two seemingly contradictory elements create a miraculous space. Itakura Mineko's voice is also good. Morita Doji is definitely present, albeit vaguely, behind the noise... Mineko Itakura of Angelin Heavy Syrup, Hiroshi Fu…

During the summer of 2013, Xiu Xiu frontman Jamie Stewart and producer Shahzad Ismaily traveled to Sigur Rós’s personal studio in Iceland. Having access to the space for only one day, Stewart worked on setting down his interpretations of American and Caribbean spirituals using a 1953 Silvertone guitar given to him by his father (producer Michael Stewart), the man who introduced him to religious thought and folk music.  The resulting album, Unclouded Sky, explores themes of death and faith over t…