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The Gag File
The work of noise musician Aaron Dilloway, formerly of Wolf Eyes, exudes a raw vulnerability and needling playfulness. His new album strikes a balance between dread and curiosity.
Live At The Edge (LP)
D.K.’s blissed performance at intimate S. Korean venue The Edge becomes the latest LP on 12th Isle Following in a familiar vein to D.K.’s enchanted fortcoming Good Morning Tapes EP, the Paris-based producer of Vietnamese descent spies a rolling soundscape of lissom rhythmic contours and finely graded harmonic humidities across the tranquilising expanse of ‘Live at The Edge’. Everything inside feels to float gradually higher from the ground and hold a mid-air conference of chirruping avian elec…
Playbacks For Dreaming
Russian synthesist Vladislav Dobrovolski conducts ruminative k-hole analog and electronic swamps on this evocative tome, blending surrealist cinematic cues with fairytale gusts of expertly-tweaked synth music.
Descriptions Of An Unfolding Event
Stéphane Laporte's solo musical project, Domotic, is a fine example of longevity. Since Bye Bye, his first album released in 2002, the Parisian conscientiously digs a groove aligning on the same axis — which over time looks more like an orbit — the aesthetically perfect pop of the Beatles, psychedelic rock, Old School Ambient, the glorious electronica of the 90’s, the eccentricities of "library music" and the rigor of minimalism. However, it would be unwise to reduce the half-dozen albums and t…
Custodian
Custodian marks a much grander stylistic experiment in The Cyrillic Typewriter’s discography of cinematic pop enigmaticism. Explained away as a score for an unreleased horror film, Custodian may be a uniquely Ruritarian soundtrack, referencing an origin of unverifiable existence, a plausible, approachable, but ephemeral stranger. Suggesting a Heart of Darkness narrative of doomed exploration and dreaded discovery, the album employs swelling drones and Delphic female vocals to convey an overarchi…
Aral Sea Stories
**Edition of 200 copies** Peter Cusack made three trips to the Aral Sea in Kazakhstan and one to the Naryn River in Kyrgyzstan to make field recordings, take photographs, talk to people and try and gain insights into the impacts of water use and abuse on the environment and people of the region. The audio tracks, photographs and notes on this album are the result of these visits. Aral Sea Stories explores the question, “What can we learn of water uses and abuses by listening to their sounds?” It…
There I See Everything
*270 copies limited edition* Centred around Maria Rossi aka Cucina Povera’s muzzy vocal loops and the faintest melodic motifs, London-based composer and multi-instrumentalist Ben Vince accompanies on saxophone, synth and piano, shrouding Rossi's vocals in swirls of dimly lit psychedelic smoke. As a newcomer to London, Rossi was "caught up in a sort of wondrous overwhelm” - a feeling that seeps through every movement of the almost hour long album. Working mostly at the Roundhouse, the pair find a…
Sixteen Ways Out
William Bennett’s Cut Hands mark a decade of disruption with magnum opus ‘Sixteen ways Out’, hailing a surprising change of pace and style into spare chamber versions of his work voiced by his creative and life partner Mimsy DeBlois
Preceded by a seven year absence, Cut Hands’ return to the fray is a solemn and haunting affair that operates in the shadowy nether region between electro-acoustic and classical musicks. Compositions from that fecund first run of Cut Hands between 2011-2015 are here …
Prosthetics
** Limited edition of 300 copies, housed in a black anti-static inner sleeve, with a silver stencil artwork ** The long-awaited debut release by yung new producer Croww for The Death of Rave, somewhere between a mixtape, imagined soundtrack and demonstrative showreel pieced together from a Slipknot sample pack used by the band’s Craig Jones on their landmark debut album and highly recommended if you're into Autechre, Rabit or Total Freedom. The severely gurned and kerned result is the Prosthetic…
This World Just Eats Me Up Alive
* 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 …
Blue Guitar
Mike Cooper's Blue Guitar is a collection that first appeared on Cooper's Hipshot CDr label in 2010 in a limited edition. It is presented here on Idea Records, for the first time on vinyl. Upon its initial release Cooper wrote: "For the past couple of years I have been collating a body of text culled (mostly) from Thomas Pynchon's novels Gravity's Rainbow and V and making cut-up collage pieces in the spirit of William Burroughs, Kurt Schwitters, Tom Phillips and others. Those two particular nove…
Dreams Drenched In Static
Cremation Lily’s “Dreams Drenched in Static” exists at the horizon of consciousness and heavy experimental music. Through the use of frenetic vocal melodies, tape degradation, and guitar noise, the album documents the liminal moments at the edge of sleep, and the distressing thoughts that often accompany late-night R.E.M. disturbances. The lyrics were largely written at three in the morning and serve to evoke the depression and meditations on death that seem to haunt these early hours.
Based in …
Fires Frame the Silhouette
Cremation Lily is the project of UK-based Z. Zsigo. For the past five years, Zsigo has been consistently working under most people's radars with his distinctly personal take on power electronics, developing a modest cult following and a respectable catalog of releases through his Strange Rules label. In 2012 the project was brought to the attention of Steve Underwood from Harbinger Sound who subsequently released the Fertility Servant 7" and the project began to gather a more visible live presen…
Rester Partir
Fresh imprint Caldeira open their account with the first vinyl retrospective of Swiss composer Louis Crelier, whose FM sorcery and Linn Drum drama takes the listener away to an imaginary Africa. Standing proud amid the sound waves, Caldeira emerges with a singular mission; to bring us music with hidden depth. Whether it’s a reissue or retrospective, archival or original, each release reflects the Michelin-grade tastebuds of label founder Camille Bertin AKA Plastic Bamboo. Operating out of the sh…
Tu Rabo Par'Abanico (LP)
There are commitments whose delineations are only defined by a territory. The series initiated in 2016 by Marion Cousin prompts an exploration of the Iberian Peninsula through its enchanted traditions, and creates for to each region a singular collaboration, born from her desires, encounters and friendships. How many albums will this series include? What forms will they take? Who will her fellow music explorers be? Nothing seems fixed here. This second opus clinches the project in its playground…
La Vie Tue
Costes practices the scorched earth policy. Everything you can listen to after it is made paltry and lighter than air. This is also what we recognize important records. They are not necessarily fun but replace all the others. The killed life is a major disc, stupid and brilliant, regressive and decisive, a political record and in its way more ecumenical and unifying than all the speeches of national reconciliation. 500 numbered copies.
Endlessness
Endlessness is the long-awaited and last instalment of a trilogy of
pieces for electric organ by artist Alfredo Costa-Monteiro. A follow-up
to Umbralia (2011) and Insula (2014), this third piece is composed by
two parts, essentially austere in approach but extremely rich in tonal
range, with a strong mesmerizing atmosphere. Through the circularity of
their forms, it explores the idea that persistence of time is our
measure of infinitude. Play loud.Born in 1964 in Porto (Portugal) Alfredo C…
Finish the Sun
Finish The Sun, the second offering from Shane Cooper & Mabuta, is a glowing and energetic album, rooted in grooves from all over the African continent. The six-piece outfit draws on influences from Mali, Nigeria, the Sahel, Morocco; and the many sounds that make up their native South Africa. This musical trip seamlessly dances through Afrobeat, maskandi, funk and hip hop, to moments of cinematic beauty. All embedded with subtle hints of 70s psychedelia. The core group of Shane Cooper, Bokani Dy…
Landslide
*Limited to 250 copies* The fourth entry in the series of six 12"/MLP releases. Brian Conniffe is a cross-genre, experimental musician who has worked with a long list of collaborators including Nurse With Wound, notable for a style which fuses the darkest psychedelia with disquieting ambience. Suzanne Walsh is a visual artist and musician, whose practice involves musical collaborations with various artists as well as her own solo artistic work, which crosses over between art and music worlds. Ne…
Hegemony of Delete
Hegemony of Delete is electronic music in dialogue with the real rhythms of work and leisure. As Co La, Matthew Papich courts the minor distractions and interruptions typically seen to dilute workflow or artistic process. With or without an audience—in the studio and in performance—his music subtly works the room, not unlike those comedians who semi-secretly draw their momentum from crowd “interruptions.”
The six songs of this 12” bear the marks of Co La’s working method, to which the title refe…