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The Young Cricketer
The Young Cricketer is Chris Corsano's debut of Frankenstein-gamelan skin detail. It's a monster and a babe all wrapped under the guise of The Solo Drum Album. Corsano's flea-market kit of cast-iron pot lids, super-bouncy-balls on sticks, butter knives, and even a sax mouth-piece jammed-in-a-hose conjures a part rhythmic maelstrom, like a Milford Graves drip painting, and the sweet metallic ice drones of Tony Conrad and Keiji Haino rubbing sticks together until end days. Globally known for a doz…
Concussion Summer
'Concussion Summer' on Not Not Fun is by a merry band of travelers called Social Junk. I've never had concussion but I was hoping to this summer, sadly there's been no decent weather for me to go out tree climbing or trying to get myself set upon by gangs of local toughs. Next year, eh? It's kind of hard to know what to say about this LP really, other than I like it. Some bits are noisy and lo-fi tribal a bit like that amazing Heavy Winged LP from a couple of weeks back and there are even…
Sticks, stones & breaking bones
restocked: "the hardest thing in the world is to have an original idea. As much as creative musicians hate to admit, free improv/experimental/underground (and all other useless adjectival identifiers) music now has as many stylistic tropes as your standard 19th century symphony: the endless variations on white noise, the orgiastic free ensemble climaxes, reassuring bass drones, "brutality", all of which point to performance, not playing. Musicians cling to the next solution that the med…
C\'est Com... Com... Compliqué
LP version with printed inner sleeve: The Bureau B label breaks into new territory and presents a newly-recorded album by Krautrock legends, Faust. "There is no group more mythical than Faust." Thus wrote English musician and eccentric Julian Cope in his classic of the genre, Krautrocksampler. Which says it all really -- neither the habitus nor the music of the six-piece Hamburg group is easy to grasp. Formed in Hamburg in 1970, some lauded Faust as the best thing that ever happened to rock, oth…
Deep In Ocean Sunk The Lamp Of Light
Earlier this year we all fell in love with the absolutely killer (but sadly ridiculously limited) 'Twisted Stems' 7" from moody Londoners Guapo, and now we have the perfect accompaniment. Aethenor is the project of Daniel O'Sullivan (of Guapo), the prolific and omnipresent Stephen O'Malley (Sunn o))), Khanate, KTL) and Vincent De Roguin and between them they have managed to lay down some of the most earth shatteringly atmospheric and cinematic soundscapes this side of Earth's incredible 'Hex' al…
Merciless
Type follow up Mike Shiflet's Sufferers with a further exposition of his individual and far-reaching sound palette. A member of C Spencer Yeh's revolving Burning Star Core unit, and a prolific collaborator with the likes of Daniel Menche, Chris Corsano, Pete Swanson and many others, Shiflet has honed an intensely visceral feel for tone and texture which makes his records so intriguing to lovers of experimental composition and music-making. With some production/audio mastering assists from fe…
Jealousy And Diamond
Kranky manage to sieve through the muck and pluck out another breathtaking album, the debut from Autistic Daughters - a collaboration between Dean Roberts, Werner Dafeldecker and Martin Brandlmayr (Radian). Those of you out there (and there are many) who revere Talk Talk’s ascent into heavenly climes with their “Laughing Stock” and “Spirit of Eden” albums will immediately find themselves seduced by this project’s wondrous effervescence. Except whereas Talk Talk emerged from a pop-focused univers…
CINo51
"Previously, a boy dreams the dreams of many other boys. He meets three other boys and they dream together. Sadly, one of his co-dreamer's dreams become nightmare. In an effort to avoid seeing their own dreams relegated back to sleeping, our hero and his fair dreaming compatriots leave their troubled friend to face his nightmares on his own. His nightcap is quickly filled and the boys march forward, eventually seeing all of their dreams made manifest. In this installment our boy has beco…
Labor Of Love
We're not complaining. Seems like a week can't go by without some new Not Not Fun opus dribbling out from the west coast label, aimed at bleeding our brains of logical thought processes and launching us into galaxies where laws are read backwards and progress is measured in long, untethering tracks of psychedelia muttered through interstellar Ham radios. This week it comes by way of slow-boiled loops and synth warbling that build towards wordless rantings best quantified as the dark prayers mean…
Harry Smith
New LP - first ever vinyl - from this great west coast drone group with a magical sÇance in tribute to occultist, archivist, artist and visionary film-maker Harry Smith, performed as a live soundtrack to his films. Mile-deep tones that you could swim in flux through intricately populated blankets of brain-cushioning foo with that classic aircraft-hangar-filled-with-white-light feel. Edition of only 300 copies with paste-on art.
Inventaire & contradictions. Retrospective 1982-88
started in the early 80's in Berlin with two electronical industrial - avant-garde associated cassette releases. A first LP on the outstanding Madrid based label Discos Esplendor Geometrico followed up by cd's and vinyl on SFCR (F) and Pinch-A-Loaf (Usa), Povertech (Usa) as well as releases with likes as MSBR, Mnortham, Frans de Waard, Ios Smolders, Artificial Memory Trace, Thomasius, TBC, The Oval Language and others, as well as a pile of compilations. Guido Hübner wrote a piece for the Zeitkr…
above the law
above the law is a 1988 action film directed by andrew zachariah davis, probably best-known for being the film debut of steven seagal. this tribute album features the full sky juice rock band lineup of s.j. jackson, s.j. jones, stoney freeman, & zac davis and was recorded between 2004 and 2008 in various ohio / michigan / massachusetts basements. except for "electric engram" which is excerpted from an infamous/aborted live radio broadcast on chicago's legendary dance station wgci.
Ni maître, Ni marteau
A key ingredient in disappearing ink, THYMOLPHTHALEIN describes the working method of this brilliant French-Australian quintet Leader Anthony Pateras conceived a detailed hour long structural premise for the group’s first tour in 2009, creating a masterful pastiche of richly dynamic, timbrally devastating explorations for electro-acoustic ensemble, melded by his own distinctive prepared piano and analogue electronics.Natasha Anderson combines buzzing slabs of electro-acoustic sound with fr…
Gussie
On a hot Minneapolis night in the summer of 2001, the legendary avant/jazz group Curlew played a scorching gig at the now-defunct Gus Lucky's Gallery. Gussie documents that evening: the veteran improvising group dispensed with their compositions altogether and took an eminently successful walk along the free-improv tightrope. The ever-evolving lineup featured George Cartwright (saxophones), Davey Williams (guitar), Chris Parker (piano), Fred Chalenor (bass), and Bruce Golden (percussion). A limi…
Machine Gun
An absolutely great (silkscreend, tip-on style cover) reissue of Peter Brötzmann's Machine Gun LP. Peter Brötzmann, tenor sax, baritone sax. Willem Breuker, tenor sax, bass clarinet. Evan Parker, tenor sax. Fred Van Hove, piano. Peter Kowald, double bass. Buschi Niebergall, double bass. Han Bennink, drums. Svenke Johansson, drums. Recorded in 1969 the music still sounds armed and dangerous.
Vibrant New Age
Sadly (for us left coasters), in November Ms Leyna Noel aka Psychic Reality decamped from SF to NYC, but before packing up her every worldly possession and road-tripping trans-America she eked out a sliver of precious time to hole up in the studio with Phil Manley (Trans Am, Jonas Reinhardt, etc) and record her long-awaited debut full-length on thick 2 inch tape. Vibrant New Age is the result. The name says it all. But Noel’s New Age is not the 80’s redux fad of healing crystals, pastel fades, d…
Gilbert Artman's Lard Free
Lard Free is French psychedelic minimalism band, formed around drummer and keyboards player Gilbert Artman. He was the only constant member of the band on their few next albums. Music on their debut album is perfectly composed angular rhythm structures-based synth/rhythm compositions with free-jazz sax improvs over them. All this mix sounds heavy, spacey, psychedelic, minimalistic - and excellent. I am not sure if this music could be labelled as "krautrock" , or let say - it's a French krautroc…
Aqua Machine
Clear violet vinyl, photo by Padmanabha. Live improvisations rec. in Buffalo, Rochester & Syracuse on April 8/9/10, 2005. SB - baritone & tenor sax, slide bass clarinet, bells, conch shell, voicemaster, noseflute, home-made 8-hole clarinet; RP - drums, percussions, gopichand, tabla. Oblique and totally improvised free music.
Blind Jesus
A journey in free improv noise ambient performed by a duo comprised of Stefano Pilia (3/4havebeeneliminated) on guitar, audio collages and effects, and media artist Andrew Hooker on electronics. Higly Recommended
Wounded Galaxies Tap At The Window
This is the long-anticipated third album by Cyclobe. Essentially a duo comprised of Ossian Brown and Stephen Thrower, Cyclobe have created a thrilling and compelling collection of music, which moves effortlessly from realms of cavernous cacophony to moments of blissful delicacy. The first new Cyclobe music to surface since their "death-concréte" missile Paraparaparallelogrammatica (an album made in collaboration with Nurse With Wound), Wounded Galaxies Tap At The Window showcases major new …