L'Herbe de Détourne
Tip! French folk experimentalist Ernest Bergez has spent several years bringing his signature, singular sound to life in solo mode. At the same time, and despite this individualist streak, he’s a musician with a deep appreciation for communal exchange and collaboration. It’s with this in mind that L’herbe de détourne, Bergez’s latest album, sees him expand his most prominent project Sourdure from a one-man band into a four-person force, and modify the name. Say hello to Sourdurent…
Bergez first …
Où Les Observer, Savoir Les Reconnaître
Vocalized electronics & intellectual kicks. Cervicals are shaking, neurons are chatting. Hello and thank you experimental France. The Americans envy us for having them. Decadent improvisations & raw virtuosity since 2006. 1803 concerts to their credit. 732,715 kilometers of road covered. A buttock forever and ever in the underground charts. Another one shamelessly coveting the MTV Music Award 2037. That's all, yeah.France Sauvage was banned from playing even before starting in the basement of th…
Lo Escucho, Lo Pinto
** Edition of 300 in handmade cover, includes A3 colour poster. ** Deep and immersive open-air Chilean trance-folk improvisations from members of KYE Records alumni Glorias Navales and Sholto Dobie. "The idea of applying free-music logic to rock structures came of age with the records The Dead C and Harry Pussy put out on Xpressway and Siltbreeze in the '90s. They created a method to follow. Keep the tropes and tools of rock and roll but ditch the formal constraints. All you are left with then i…
Udge
Melbourne-based Francis Plagne returns to Horn of Plenty with possibly his strongest statement to date, Udge.
In Hell
*2023 stock. 250 copies limited edition* It’s not like we’ve been long time followers of Eve Adams. We found out about her around the release of her third record ‘Metal Bird’, in early 2021. A great album that led us to dig through the rest of her discography. We were delighted to find out she’d already put out an ep and two albums. It was ‘In Hell’, released on cassette in 2017, that struck us in particular. An album that, in our opinion, demands to be listened to on vinyl. Eve Adams makes ‘Am…
Twilight Furl
"We must show social conditions, not just songs." a wise music ethnologist once said. But how to transport environments into song sonics? The enigmatic duo Greymouth found a creative answer and sent their conceptions to Berlin Neukölln, right at the steps of the bustling Kashual Plastik office, where an unclear corpus of operative's fashion new sounding crypto currencies 24/7. Four tranquilized speed ballads waxed on 7inch vinyl, carrying drunken melodies, kraut-intoxicated grooves, and outlandi…
Avoidance Language
*2023 stock* "There have been some very cool guitar duo LPs over the years -- Bert Jansch & John Renbourn's Bert & John, Danny Kalb & Stefan Grossman's Crosscurrents, Jody Harris & Robert Quine's Escape, Charalambides' Joy Shapes, Bill Orcutt & Michael Morley's Electric Guitar Duets, any comp of Kansas Joe McCoy & Memphis Minnie, etc. -- but there has never been one quite like Avoidance Language. It is a wild-eyed classic from start to finish. Ostensibly a meeting between two guitarists lurking …
You Can Can
You Can Can is an echoed affirmation, an album which traces song forms around silence, field recordings, and degraded analog memories. This is folk music transmogrified and mutated, as if recorded and reconstructed in Pierre Schaffer’s GRM studio.
Stikling
Small repress available, don't miss it **200 copies** "This record began in summer 2020, when I was staying at Andersabo, Sweden, where I run an artists' residency. I had access to a nearby church, and would set drones going on the organ while playing clarinet and piano. I started working with the combination of these long, sustained tones, combined with acoustic instruments, where the sound's duration was only as long as a breath or the pluck of a string. A lot of the last Blue Lake LP was made…
Hosono House
*2023 stock* The unbelievably prolific Haruomi Hosono is one of the major architects of modern Japanese pop music. With his encyclopedic knowledge of music and boundless curiosity for new sounds, Hosono has put his unmistakable stamp on hundreds of recordings as a session player, producer, and auteur of his own idiosyncratic musical world. Born and raised in central Tokyo, his adolescent obsession with American pop culture informed his early forays into country music, which he would revisit late…
Absolut Gehör
*321 copies limited edition. In process of stocking. 2023 stock* Origami Arktika is one of Norway’s best kept secrets. They serve a mutated folk music, rooted in the county of Telemark, interspaced with drones, noise, electronica and undefinable elements. They mix the archaic with the modern. Paper folding with frozen fingers.
"People forget that noise music is just as much grounded in subtlety and elusive sophistications as in deafening roars and colliding atonalities. I cite Morphogenesis' fi…
Grenselos
*200 copies limited edition. In process of stocking* Origami Arktika is one of Norway’s best kept secrets. They serve a mutated folk music, rooted in the county of Telemark, interspaced with drones, noise, electronica and undefinable elements. They mix the archaic with the modern. Paper folding with frozen fingers.
OA moves along the axis of time by using Old Norwegian folk songs and folklore, combined with modern inspiration and technology. OA is a knotty time machine, hotwired by haystack-pol…
Message
Small repress available, last copies * Limited edition of 199 copies, Urashima’s first ever reissue of the album furthers these insights, extending the original EP with six brand-new reworks. * Japanese solo project Jun Konagaya's Grim beautiful 1987 EP Message is his first and sole full folk music release, despite having an album called Folk Music in 1986 that was a classic industrial album, featuring Yukio Nagoshi, founding member of the Vasilisk unit, on guitar and percussion and A. Takahashi…
Fleur De Chagrin
*300 copies limited edition* Pauline Marx, formerly of the fantastic duo La Fureur de Vouivre, seems like a being from another time and place; namely, an escaped marauder lurking in the forests of a Bruegel painting and integrating the surreal flora and fauna of a Boschian creation into the scenery and lore of deep Brittany. Her invented mythology is loaded with murky rituals and contorted mantras, backed by the surprising sounds and textures of terrains so earthly and so unreal. Where do you th…
Big Blood and The Bleedin' Hearts
Big Blood are Colleen Kinsella and Caleb Mulkerin who live in South Portland, Maine, where they make and record experimental music at home. They have made twenty-something records since 2006. The music is a vehicle for dealing with what is going on in their heads, which runs the gamut from friends they have lost, to frustrations during the day, and the larger world picture. Without sounding insincere, they make music for themselves, that at times can be wildly inconsistent.
In 2007, they releas…
The Grove
Big Blood are Colleen Kinsella and Caleb Mulkerin who live in South Portland, Maine, where they make and record experimental music at home. They have made twenty-something records since 2006. The music is a vehicle for dealing with what is going on in their heads, which runs the gamut from friends they have lost, to frustrations during the day, and the larger world picture. Without sounding insincere, they make music for themselves, that at times can be wildly inconsistent.
In 2007, they releas…
Its Own Phantom
Tip! Edition of 100 copies, with risograph printed j card "Five years after the magnificent Valosta Valoon LP (FTR 331LP, 2017), Finnish multi-instrumentalist, Niko Karlsson is back with a new swab of sound that is even more organic than its predecessor. This time out the focus is more on acoustic strings and percussion, with a minimum of machine-driven sounds, even when things get cinematically tense (especially on the B-side). But the bulk of Niko's new tape (which he had first suggested be re…
Semi Mondi
Tip! A musician expresses himself with sound; it seems a triviality, but any thought or idea launched takes shape and can be heard, can be listened to. Thus in a spontaneous way, one after another, particles can end up coming together bearing fruit, creating environments and scenarios, evolving. In this case, Maurizio Abate decides to paint short sound pictures, which become real pieces. These pieces are submitted to the listening of friends, who by free associations name them following their ow…
Headdress
'I’ll set the scene – we’re all passed out face-down in the lawn of the first Bush term, scratching our heads after 9/11 and wondering how much more dystopian it’s about to get. Ash hangs in the air as we march toward endless war, and the activities of the post-hippie, post-beat, post-punk, post-jazz, post-industrial, post-experimental bohemian underground flail against the avalanche with a mystic fire you can’t get your arms around, let alone bottle up for consumption. Jars of tears, rockets fr…
The Sounds of VÖ
From the opening seconds it’s clear that the debut recording of the improvising sextet VÖ is not just another free improv session. The deeply meditative sounds may conjure disparate folk traditions from around the globe, whether Scandinavian fiddle tunes or the way Alex Zethson’s meandering pump organ evokes the exploratory harmonium lines in Pakistani qawwali music, but these associations are mostly coincidental. The ensemble members are devoted to improvised and experimental music mostly as an…