Earth Leaps Up
The Giving Shapes is a collaborative project between harpist/vocalist Elisa Thorn and pianist/vocalist Robyn Jacob that formed in fall 2017 at the Banff Centre for the Arts. This is the duo’s first release. This project triangulates aspects of new music, creative music, and song-writing, combining their classical training and their involvement with the Canadian creative and indie music scenes. Though they originally met while both pursuing degrees in classical music at UBC in 2007, they share an…
Robot Brujo
In the wild and tangled web of sound that makes up contemporary experimental music, it can be hard to see up from down. Beyond all their obvious tasks, record labels double as a crucial lens. Ears to the ground, they build context and understanding for the disparate elements of this sonic world. Among the most notable of these, looking beyond the well trodden path, is Hands In The Dark.Over the last decade, they’ve become an unmissable force, bringing visionary and unexpected projects into focus…
The Last Five Minutes
Following an input by Marco Pandin, Alberto Carozzi recorded four minimal pieces on electric guitar, improvising on the concept of playing as less as possible. The four pieces then became five with the collaboration of Matteo Uggeri, who added tribal beats and weird samples. He then mixed the whole album, entitled The Last Five Minutes, an invitation to manage tension through patience.
Gratitude
Martina Verhoeven has been working on the development of her own photographic style for about 20 years, almost parallel to this process Martina took up the electric fretless bass when recording the two criticaly-acclaimed 3 Seconds Of Air albums (with Dirk Serries). As her photography continues to grow, expand and develop, slowly mutating into collages on canvas, so does her approach to music. Switching from electric bass to double bass to piano, she slowly mastered a technique that's exceptiona…
Music For Laboratories
**200 copies, tip!** Music For Laboratories is a project by Orlando Lostumbo - a Roman double bass player and composer - who, for this work, has chosen the moniker of Spheric. For the realization of Music For Laboratories, the artist has been inspired by his working environment, a research institute - the Istituto Superiore di Sanitá - where, for over thirty years, he has been working as an employee at the internal library, one of the most important in the biomedical field in Italy. The ongoing …
Cimora
Over the last decade multi instrumentalist Tomás Tello has been developing his own personal music style based around an exploration of the guitar and his intense personal investigation of traditional Peruvian music - in particular Andean culture which he grew up with. Now operating out of Tavira, Tomás has been functioning like a psychic musician, a well tuned antenna picking an unique sound universe where, among others, sounds of native instruments (quenas, drums, charangos) and experimental el…
Post Internet Blues
Post Internet Blues is UK group Gad Whip's latest album, following several low-key cassette albums released since 2014, plus the four tracks that constitute 2017's limited edition In A Room EP. Gad Whip blend avant-garde sensibilities with a contemporary take on the place where D.I.Y. culture meets post-punk, hints of deconstructed garage rock and interstellar voyaging through sweat-drenched waking dreams. Immediate, powerful, confounding and kept in place by wry, sometimes observational, vocals…
Lust In Peace
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…
Szc Zcz Cze Zec Eci Cin
"A trio comprised of Thomas Lehn (analogue synthesizer), Ivar Grydeland (guitar, guitar banjo) and Ingar Zach (percussion). All three come from the improvisation field and here you can find them in full form, treating their instruments with care and trust, bending and breaking the things at hand. The trio offers a very dynamic set of music, going from soft introspective parts to loud, vicious strokes. Their instruments sound usually unlike what they are supposed to sound, save, perhaps, for Lehn…
Say No To Hate
Bruce Russell and Noel Meek return with their second harsh noise collaboration. Their first, Classical Music (2018) was an all-electronics wrestling bout that simulated engine testing on a long-haul passenger jet. Their new album combines guitar, violin and electronics and was recorded in a wood workshop. You can hear the power tools, even though none were actually used. Extreme noise can sometimes be associated with offensive, racist or extreme-right views. The New Zealand duo have chosen to sp…
Structure of Water
**60 copies, tip!** "Oxygen, water, bubbles, outflows, movements and bends of water, the dance of round bubbles that replace each other. They fly around stretching and thickening. Such is the structure of water. Water is another level of consciousness inaccessible to human understanding. To understand the water you need to merge with her and become her."Music: metra.vestludDesign: KmerlRecorded at Yekaterinburg, Russia
Along the Sun and the Rain
**60 copies** Based in Jyväskylä, Finland, Keijo Virtanen is somewhat of a legend in the whole finnish psych scene (on the same level as Pekka Airaksinen - in fact the two have collaborated before). He’s been working on music for ages but his work has only been starting to get attention during the last few years. This artist’s music is unlike any other, it is often based in ambient and drone and incorporates weird traditional folk instruments from around the world just as much as electronic inst…
Corridor of Daylights
**Deluxe edition** Black Editions present the first ever vinyl edition of Go Hirano's third album, Corridor of Daylights, originally released in 2004. Corridor of Daylights is a quiet work of dreamlike brilliance. A home field recording where fragile piano melodies float alongside wind-chimes and wistful melodicas - insects hum in the distance and a breeze gently rustles as summer day eases toward evening. Originally released in Japan by P.S.F. Records in 2004, Corridor of Daylights is a beautif…
Barbara Rubin & The Exploding NY Underground
"Made when she was just 18 years old, Barbara Rubin's art-porn masterpiece Christmas On Earth (1963-65) shocked NYC's experimental film scene and inspired NYC's thriving underground. For the next four years her filmmaking and irrepressible energy helped shatter artistic and sexist boundaries. A mythical 'Zelig' of the sixties, she introduced Andy Warhol to the Velvet Underground and Bob Dylan to the Kabbalah. But beyond shaping the spirit of the sixties, Barbara was seeking the deeper meaning of…
Urban Fossickated Octave
**250 copies** "Beautiful new LP (the seventh, I believe), from this wonderfully abstract outfit, who were birthed in the shadow of Smegma (Portland, OR), but have since relocated to Maine. The foundational members of the band are Grant Corum (keyboards, vocals, tin whistle, vocals) and Suzanne Stone (alto sax, khene, vocals). For this album, recorded by Big Blood's Caleb Mulkerin, they are joined by Caleb himself (tape loops and treatments) and Tom Kovacevic (piano and synth), both of whom play…
Early Abstractions, Vol. 1
**300 copies** "Three:four Records (Switzerland) and Feeding Tube Records (USA) are pleased to announce the release of Early Abstractions, Vol. 1 by Danny Oxenberg (Supreme Dicks), Bear Galvin, and Friends (Pillow Mt. Conspiracy). Early Abstractions, Vol. 1 is the follow-up their 2016 release Late Superimpositions (three:four records), and contains recordings made in New York, Western Massachusetts, and Los Angeles -- some old, some older, some relatively new, some borrowed, some blue... Around …
Sore Eros
**250 copies** "After five long years of waiting, rural psych masters, Sore Eros, return with an extended statement of purpose. Although their partial spatial dislocation from Western Mass has seemly rendered them a studio-oriented outfit, the lovely tangles of sound they create are as optimally fried as ever. The album was helmed by engineer/producer Adam Granduciel (War on Drugs) who was the only one capable of coaxing the whole band into the studio. Aided by players like Daniel Oxenberg (ex-S…
Last Year's Man / After Vermeer
"My first deep exposure to Leonard Cohen was the Bird on a Wire documentary by Tony Palmer, which was, against the odds, broadcast on public television in New Zealand around 1974 or 1975. At age 15 or 16 I thought it was too dark. A few years later, in the late '70s, I wanted things darker. The first Cohen LP was very clever but a little too "up." The second was too public and political for me. Songs of Love and Hate seemed more honest, more about personal failure. I liked it, although Cohen ten…
Framework 2
Danish musician/composer Mads Emil Nielsen continues his Framework series; a collection of open, hand-drawn graphic scores and recordings. The series includes Nielsen’s own subjective translations of the visual material and sound pieces accompanied by visual notations, and collaborations – in this case with Andrea Neumann, Jan Jelinek and Hideki Umezawa. Framework 2 consists of printed scores and recordings, released on 2 x 10” vinyl + DL. Circles (Disc1: side A) is a dense, 03:45 collage of sy…
Radio Silence
With This Kind Of Punishment, Graeme Jefferies and Peter Jefferies produced some of most adept DIY sounds to emerge from New Zealand's 1980s post-punk scene. After their phenomenal self-titled debut and classic A Beard Of Bees, the brothers would make one last album together, In The Same Room. Originally released in 1987 on Flying Nun, In The Same Room is perhaps the straightest rock offering in TKP's esteemed catalogue. Opening track "Immigration Song" expertly pairs jagged guitars with wrathf…