Mahjun (1973)
Solid orange vinyl version. Milestone repress! First time vinyl reissue of the eponymous classic debut album by Mahjun, one of the most innovative French prog underground bands, on the productive Saravah label in 1973. Their music, as you can hear on tracks such as "Les Enfants Sauvages" or "Chez Planos", is a subtle mix of spiritual jazz, pop music, folk and avant-garde reminiscent of Full Moon Ensemble, Brigitte Fontaine or the Thêatre du Chêne Noir. Standard black vinyl LP version is in …
Mahjun (1974) - LP
Solid blue vinyl version. Edition of 200. On Mahjun's second eponymous album released by Saravah in 1974, percussionist Nana Vasconcellos joined the line up on the nearly 14 minute long track "La Ville Pue" and "Fin Janvier". Their politico folk-prog sound moved to an ethnic flavored psychedelic fusion. First time reissue of this classic and influential album. Standard black vinyl LP version is in an edition of 500. Comes in 350 gram sleeve with an obi strip, insert and matte printing.
Hau-RUK
First legit reissue of the 1st Xhol album (post Xhol Caravan), originally released by the legendary OHR label in 1971. Previously bootlegged in poor fashion by Germanofon, this comes with one 22-minute bonus track (from 1974) and the usual thick booklet of liner notes and photos by Garden of Delights. This album followed Electrip and precedes Motherfuckers GMBH. One of the more confounding pieces of the Krautrock puzzle, Xhol played long, wasted lounge-blues excursions, much favored by the…
Headcrack
Released as a vinyl-only album on Sterile Records in 1986, Controlled Bleeding's Headcrack is a monumental album of industrial-noise meets ambient soundscapes. The original record is hopelessly out of print, and Toronto-based Artoffact Records reissues it with remastered audio and updated cover art for the first time. Essential listening!
Front And Above
A new trio formed by John Chantler — best known for his solo synthesizer recordings and work with pipe organs — and two of the most instantly recognisable voices in the scene loosely associated with London’s Cafe OTO — drummer Steve Noble and saxophonist Seymour Wright. Their debut CD 'Front & Above' was released on Chantler's 1703 Skivbolaget label in October 2017.
"A terrific set that quietly opens a portal to a new world." — The Quietus
Tpeso
** edition of 200 ** Sebastiano Carghini is a musician whose research is mainly focused on the use of modular synth and the recording of physical objects. After his recent releases for Second Sleep, New York Haunted and Hideous Replica, he’s now for the first time on wax with this miscellaneous composition out of several recordings dating from 2014 through 2015. The result is a powerful and complex, unconventional collage, just as if a bunch of tracks were squeezed on it. Found objects, DC…
Goldberg Variations
To the so-called experimental music audience, Claudio Rocchetti is widely known as an incessantly active avant musician (apart from his main solo project he is also part of 3/4HadBeenEliminated, Olyvetty, power quartet In Zaire, and brand new duo Geodetic along with Jukka Reverberi — just to name few of his side projects and collaborations), though he’s ever increasingly expanding his investigation into the fields of writing (Il cuore delle formiche) and installation (The Promised Garden).…
Astor
The fourth Astor offering presents itself as a limited cassette, intended to fill the vacuum prior to the next full-length LP expected to hatch in the year of 2018. A self-titled diary-esque offering, this collects recordings made in the UK and Europe throughout 2017 -- from a toilet on a train in France to a piece played on Henning Christiansen's piano on the island of Møn in Denmark. Here you'll embark on a journey of sound that travels through a vast terrain which holds itself together …
Enka Mood Collection
Masami Kawaguchi has been an influential figure in the Japanese underground scene for 2 decades, playing with bands such as Miminokoto, Broomdusters, Los Doroncos and more recently with his New Rock Syndicate. He's also known as a major & regular Keiji Haino collaborator in Aihiyo, and more recently in Hardy Soul. He's one of the greats of modern Japanese psychedelic rock and more recently he recorded the beautiful The Mad Guitar Sings' album on Black Petal, which is a dark solo take on Ma…
Vang Circular
Vang Circular is the first outing from Timo van Luijk (La Scie Dorée / Af Ursin, Elodie) and Mark Harwood (Penultimate Press / Astor). Employing vibes, mellotron, natural reader, an iron ant, synth, metal pipes, slide guitar and a double bass these audacious souls conjure a wonky musical vision that gently peels away the familiar The results are a surprising synthesis of two individual and somewhat oppositional aesthetics. From the farthest reaches of the galaxy to the highest celestial p…
Nature Lovers
* 200 copies * Norwegian musicians Lasse Marhaug and Jon Wesseltoft team up for a computer duo. Pretty abstract but not too noisy computer music this. Marhaug is well known in the field of noise music but has frequently drifted into other areas such as improvisation and jazz, contributing throughout his career to well over three-hundred releases, and also publishing the amazing fanzine Personal Best under his own imprint Marhaug Forlag. Jon Wesseltoft is a multi-instrumentalist actively performi…
Rough Tongue
Beam Splitter (Audrey Chen and Henrik Munkeby Nørstebø) is a duo for amplified voice and trombone. Beam Splitter‘s debut album Rough Tongue on Corvo Records is one part, a timbral collage of carefully extracted sound material and in another, a longer moment taken from an intimate room below the din. All tracks are taken from three live concerts in 2016. Utilizing the pure sounds of acoustic and closely amplified trombone and voice, the record exemplifies the joining together of these two i…
Memory In Vivo Exposure
Memory In Vivo Exposure presents maverick percussionist Valentina Magaletti (Raime, UUUU) and her bandmate Tom Relleen at their most dextrous in four pieces ranging from a superb meld of Afro-Reichian phrasing and location recordings in the 2-part title cut, thru to busted post-punk knocks on The Inexorable Sadness of Pencils, and back to rhythmelodic hypnotism with Il Fiume Di Ferro. “London band Tomaga are back with their fourth release under the Hands in the Dark banner: Memory in Vivo Expos…
Road Not Driving
Last time we checked in with Dan Melchior, he was Playing The Greys. What has he been up to lately? Melchior is as aesthetically restless as he is endlessly creative, so in between recording an album with Austin TX art-punk trio Spray Paint and a myriad of tape and vinyl releases, Dan found the time to gift Ever/Never with another classic slice of Melchiorcore (please, shoot the messenger for that one). Road Not Driving is a 12” EP that covers a fair amount of ground during its runtime.“I Got A …
Hell! Hell! Hell! Hell! Hell!
A crucial piece of the Loren Connors jigsaw falls into place with this first ever vinyl reissue of Hell! Hell! Hell! Hell! Hell!, now presented on wax some 20 years after the original CD issue thru The Lotus Sound. Leading on from his classic Long Nights (on Table of the Elements), it takes that album’s blues-noise textures into even starker, scorched ground surely irresistible to anyone snagged by his other works, for their anomalous nature if nowt else.Revolving around 12 works in under 20 min…
Plainlight
A gorgeous set of new tracks by the brilliant composer and multi-instrumentalist Eyvind Kang. It took him a decade and a half to revisit the vibe concocted on his masterpiece from 2001, Live Low To The Earth In The Iron Age, but the wait was worth it. It features an array of spiritually intoxicating instrumentation: tamboura, electric guitar, organ, trumpet, oboe, trombone, and Korean traditional instruments. Eyvind Kang on Plainlight: "In 2002 I wanted to make a kind of sequel to my first so…
Live in Melbourne
2015 Live Recording from "Supersense" Festival Melbourne featuring a 'supergroup' formed around Manuel Göttsching, Ariel Pink, Oren Ambarchi, Shags Chamberlain playing material from the classic Ashe Ra Tempel releases "Schwingungen" and "Seven Up". "Out of the blue - I was invited to perform in Melbourne, Australia. It happened thanks to my dear old friend Mick Glossop, who made the suggestion to Sophia Brous, at the time the curator of a music-festival called „Supersense“ at the Melbourne Arts…
Joan of Arc
**Edition of 200** Joan Of Arc is a project conceived by Eric Schmid and Sean McCann, running in line with St. Francis and St. Paul. This series of CD and pamphlets, writings bounded together with unbounded audio elements. Schmid and McCann roped in professional vocalist Christina Stanley to sing the last piece, which is a tip to Ulises Carrión's "Hamlet, For Two Voices", pulled from Friedrich Schiller's Maid Of Orleans (1801). Matthew Sullivan dusted off his pain tongs and sent over some sou…
Trajectories
Trajectories is the second full-length album by Michael Vincent Waller, featuring pianist R. Andrew Lee and cellist Seth Parker Woods. The album will be released on September 8th, 2017, on Sean McCann’s Los Angeles based label, Recital. The CD/LP editions include photography by Phill Niblock, liner notes by "Blue" Gene Tyranny, and mastering by Denis Blackham. "In these evocative works, Michael Vincent Waller details his responses to mostly situations of introspection, in which the compose…
Downdate
Seijiro Murayama, a percussionist/drummer currently based in Japan, lived in France for a number of years and has received acclaim in the west for his musicianship. He performs frequently both inside and outside Japan. This is Murayama’s first solo album since “Broken Iteration” was released on the Herbal International label four years ago, in 2013. It consists of two tracks of about 20 minutes and one of about 7 minutes (3 in total). Overlapping and combining with percussion and scraping…