Felicita
“Whether it is traditional or contemporary, we need to be authentic,” says Gözen Atila who performs as Anadol. “I don't claim that I am authentic, but this is what I want to achieve.” A sense of authentic exploration, introspection and celebration coats every inch of Anadol’s latest album. After 2019’s Uzun Havalar, the Turkish artist returns with an album that continues to explore a variety of deeply embedded musical traditions while also hurtling into new terrain.
The music and influences - a…
Underground Altena
Alga Marghen returns with an absolute stunner, the LP “Underground Altena”, comprising a never before heard or released series of recordings capturing Anima - the duo of Limpe Fuchs and Paul Fuchs - in 1973. Largely rendered on a striking array of instruments, invented and played by the couple, its otherworldly, visionary sounds upend nearly every perception held about underground music transpiring in Germany during this period. Wild, wonderful, truly free, and inspiring as records come.
Musiques Vertes
A document of pure sonic magic and stunningly organic creativity, Holidays Records drops the first ever vinyl reissue of Jean-Yves Bosseur's visionary 1982 LP “Musiques Vertes”, recorded by the legendary French ornithologist and wildlife field recordist Jean-Claude Roché. Utilizing handmade instruments constructed from plants and other natural materials, played by collective of children and untrained musicians, its radically experimental sounds build a revelatory bridge between the avant-garde a…
World Speaks
** Edition of 300 ** World Speaks by Piotr Kurek. It consists of seven vivid paintings. We are greeted by processed voices. A bit later we listen to a fine reed solo, while an organist performs a meditative melody. Hints of a human presence, but World Speaks sounds uninhabited. Instead we enter a glassy reality where the simulation is at play. And where nothing seems what it is: are we witness to the choreography – or the rocky seashore?
“At that time I was playing with various vocal banks I’ve…
The Ear Cannot Be Filled With Hearing
Abschattungen is the band Giovanni Di Domenico formed to pay hommage to everything that goes under the name ‘funk’. Strong grooves are laid under a forest of psychedelic textures and intense melodies, filling the auditory space with dense metaphysic dance movements. Taking inspiration from albums as Sun Ra’s Lanquidity and Gruppo Di Improvvisazione Nuova Consonanza’s Feedback, black music inspired pulsations are fused with contemporary music’s sensibilities and the power of free jazz, resulting …
Hiking The Trails Of Mount Muzak
No time to waste: nine months after Tim Vanhamel released 'Dubs Pour Oh La La', his debut album under the moniker Comité Hypnotisé, the Millionaire frontman presents already the second album 'Hiking The Trails Of Mount Muzak'. Hardly leaving any traces of the dubbed out vibe which marked the first record, Tim expands his Comité Hypnotisé universe to a surprising next level on this second album: exploring a place where James Last, Wu-Tang Clan and Dj Shadow are cooking up a Thai meal in a Peruvia…
Sift
Debut LP from this new Philadelphia four-piece whose members include Siltbreeze, Blackest Ever Black, Vitrine, Cor Ardens, & Kashual Plastik alumni. With one sought-after tape behind them the band attempt a surreal approximation of nice music.
Their general merriment and creative fervour was captured in recordings over a few chance family dinners and channelled through a selection of poorly tuned instruments and detritus. Songs collapsing into abstraction, or vagueness uniting in melody, Sift ca…
Sonic Gnostic
A truly stunning piece of work, Aspen Edities’ latest - Eyvind Kang’s “Sonic Gnostic” - radically bridges the worlds of minimal composition, rigorous experimentation, and improvised forms, in ways that locks Kang in the mind as one of America’s most original thinkers in the contemporary landscape of sound.
…et après (2Lp)
After an already productive year, Alga Marghen, in the guise of their sub-imprint, Planam, delivers, “…et après”, an astounding double LP of archival material documenting the collaboration between Luc Ferrari and Ensemble Laborintus. Issued in a limited edition of 250 copies on vinyl, and bristling with tense electroacoustic sonorities at the forefront of electronic and experimental chamber music, it's among the most challenging, exciting, and engaging albums we’ve heard all year.
Recherche Dans Le Rêve (LP)
Tip! ' Edition of 300' After a couple of limited art releases on Des Astres D’Or (now Astres d’Or) this is the first more widely available release of Wendingen 1918. Aural analogue surreal investigations by the trio of Raymond Dijkstra (Asra, bhaavitaaH bhuutasthaH, Santasede), Bart De Paepe (Ilta Hämärä, Innercity, Bombay Lunatic Asylum) and Frédérique Bruyas (Emmanuel Dilhac, La Poupée Vivante, Nivritti Marga). A hybrid mix of dynamic electronics, spatial sounds and poetry expressing a dazzlin…
Memories of Perversion
Waswaas wanders further down the path of analogue and modular darkness, casting out his first album, Memories of Perversion. The 11 tracks traverse a range of electronic moods, tinged with moments of liturgical voicing, dissonant canonistic sequences and arcade-style sequencing. This is music for the wormhole interior.
Mind Maintenance (LP)
Meditative moods from the Chicago duo of bassist Josh Abrams and percussionist Chad Taylor. With Taylor on mbira and Abrams on guimbri, instruments from diverse African states, finding a new pairing that moves past world music and jazz into something new, to do with dance, meditation, listening and convergence. Natural Information Society's Abrams has been using the guimbri, a lute-style bass, for years, but it's rarely sounded better than it does here, alongside Taylor's resonant mbira. Taylor …
Yüen Shan
Michael Ranta is one of those rare composers able to organically melt his wide artistic span into a singular but yet diverse universe morphing his rich vocabulary as a percussionist with the Oriental esoteric tradition, the psychedelic underground and the realm of electronic minimalism.Yuen Shan (Round Mountain in chinese) was conceived in 1972 and finalised in 2014. It’s a major work in Ranta’s oeuvre (his first solo release in almost 25 years), highly personal and spiritual. A musical cosmogon…
Orbs And Channels (LP)
* 2021 Stock * Hailing from Toulouse in the South of France, Saåad is composed of Romain Barbot and Grégory Buffier. Since 2009 the prolific pair has been spending the dark hours of night-time exploring the realms of sound with a combination of epic, abstract drone and ambient improvisations, new concepts, elaborate murky atmospheres, and a strong visual identity as the trademark of their collaboration. Pressed on vinyl for the very first time, Orbs & Channels is also the first reissue release …
Blue Rot (LP)
Razen are back with a second album on HITD, follow up to last year's release 'Robot Brujo'. On 'Blue Rot', the band introduces a softer palette and a new quartet, as the core duo of multi-instrumentalists Brecht Ameel and Kim Delcour is augmented with new band member Berlinde Deman on Serpent and guest Thomas Bloch on Glassharmonica and crystal Baschet. Drawing inspiration from late 19th-Century Symbolist art, 'Blue Rot' summons heartbreak and the perils of isolation in languid, hypnotic modes,…
Labyrinth
* 2021 Stock * Multi-instrumentalist, musician, photographer and co-founder of groups such as Oiseaux-Tempête, Le Réveil des Tropiques, FOUDRE!, The Rustle Of The Stars and FareWell Poetry, Frédéric D. Oberland takes, as the starting point for his sophomore solo album, a vertiginous dive into George Bataille's 'Inner Experience' and the cave of Dante's 'Inferno'. A condensed version of a sound and visual installation created in the basement of the contemporary art space Labanque in Béthune, 'Lab…
Dubs Pour Oh La La
Not a lockdown record here: With 'Comité Hypnotisé' Tim Vanhamel (Millionaire, Evil Superstars...) tumbles into a subsonic wormhole where smoked out dub glues with boogie funk and off-kiltered early hip hop vibes. Transcending frequencies from an unknown galaxy channeled through a broken 70’s echo deck. Shortly after Evil Superstars played a one off concert for ‘An Evening With Laika’ in the Ancienne Belgique in 2013 Tim started to create the music which was the entering point of ‘Dubs Pour Oh …
Grounded
** First pressing of 200 ** Astral Spirits presents Grounded by Aaron Novik. This album was made with the acoustic sounds of the clarinet, bass clarinet and contrabass clarinet with minimal effects. It was recorded during lockdown in Elmhurst Queens, NY, April-May 2020. Mixed by Eli Crews at Spillway. Mastered by Jon Cohrs at Bear Call. Cover Art by Ariadna Garza.
Shadows of Tomorrow b/w The Brain Produces Electrical Waves
** First pressing of 350 with artwork by Jaime Zuverza ** Astral Spirit presents Shadows of Tomorrow b/w The Brain Produces Electrical Waves by Mats Gustafsson & Joachim Nordwall. Recorded in Nickelsdorf and Brännö in 2019-2020. Mixed by JN at the Gothenburg Sound Experiment.
Kagiroi
I met Sugai Ken a few years ago in Tokyo, outside the Dommune radio studios. His personality and music, a very special brand, touched me. His music is a coded vision of a dream world. A trade that is progressive yet traditional - in the most positive sense of the word. Recently out of the blue, Sugai San sent me a collection of personal field recordings he made of folklore groups and public performances in Tokyo, Toyama, Kanagawa, Kyoto, Tottori, … The close listener already knows that Sugai San…