Michael Oosten
* 2021 Stock * Keeping a band together was difficult in the late 1960’s. Tough too, because Michael Oosten was writing songs that veered away from pop-song structures. There was also the relative ease and lack of responsibility required for hauling around a guitar. So, Oosten took off, with a Martin guitar in tow, playing coffeehouses and clubs across the country. By the end of 1973, he was ready to record an LP—five psychedelic folk/rock tracks, ranging from the brightly smiling ‘Sunny Day’ to …
Turn Back Metropolis
The very latest album by the Brighton duo built around drums, electronics and vocals. As with the previous album, 'Void Axis', from 2018, this is joint-released by drummer Andy Pyne's own Foolproof Projects imprint and arrives adorned in wonderful, characteristic artwork by vocalist Lisa Jayne. Also packaged with an 8pp booklet featuring all the words. "A stream of angst and agitation not seen since the anarcho-punk days of the eighties worms its way into the rhythm and voice of this Brighton ba…
Under the Radar - Underground Zines and Self-Publications 1965 / 1975
* 2021 Stock. Language: English * The mid-1960s witnessed a boom in underground and selfpublished works. Hectographs, mimeographs, and offset printing not only allowed for the production of small, lowcost print runs but also promote a unique aesthetic: using wild mock-ups, »messianic amateurs« combined typescript aesthetics, handwriting, scribbled drawings, assemblages of collaged visuals, porn photos, snapshots, and comic strips. The typography consciously frees itself, in parallel to a liberal…
It Was the Streets that Raised Me
* 2021 Stock. Language: English * Coming from a HipHop and Punk/Hardcore background, the streets are the place where all our relevant references come together: music, skateboarding, graffiti, political action. The book thus combines selftaken photographs of our surroundings and found footage ranging from movie stills to reproduced magazines and record covers. Both layers are intertwined in a fictional script, formulating an attitude which links Leipzig in 2010 to the New York City of the late 80…
Trippin' Musik
* This 2 CD set features 35 minutes of extra material not available on the vinyl release * Following from the reissue of NWW’s ’Soliloquy For Lilith’ boxset, ‘Trippin’ Musik’ relays the most recent findings from Steven Stapleton and co’s ongoing psychedelic research / surrealist reconnaissance / occult practice in electro-acoustic and avant-garde spheres. As the title suggests, it’s one for the journey, taking up whole sides of vinyl with intensely and intently focussed recordings that often tak…
To the Quiet Men From a Tiny Girl
Following on the footsteps of Chance Meeting on a Dissecting Table, To the Quiet Men From a Tiny Girl was Nurse With Wound's second album and shows the group refining itself from the debut and adding a lot more dynamics. The record starts off with the very short Umbrella Link, really just some guitar riffing from engineer Nicky Rodgers as a concession for NWW. to use his recording studio, before segueing into the side-long She Alone Hole and Open.Along with the clattering and clanking percussion…
Fabulous Paris
* 2021 Stock * An excellent release of classic Trevor Wishart material. Fabulous Paris was commissioned by Swedish Radio, Malmö, and the Birmingham Rumours Festival. This 3-movement, secular oratorio explores our collective and individual experience of the mass industrial society in which we live, through the medium of the human voice. CD release includes extensive liner notes on the 3 pieces.
Burn the Night / Bruciare la Notte: Original Recordings, 1983-1989
Burn the Night / Bruciare la Notte: Original Recordings, 1983–1989 is the first archival collection of music by the Italian minimalist composer Tiziano Popoli. In his music, Popoli framed the Italian avant-garde and New Wave of the 1980s through an architectural aesthetic distinctly detailed by a Yamaha DX7 synthesizer, Roland TR-909 drum machine, and early sampling technology.
Peter and the Wolves
Adele Bertei is a poet, writer, actor, performer, singer, songwriter, and filmmaker. She entered the downtown New York scene of the late 1970s as organist for musical insurrectionists, the Contortions. Bertei appeared in lead roles in several indie films, notably Lizzie Borden’s Born in Flames, and has toured with, written songs for, and recorded as a vocalist for artists as diverse as Tears for Fears, Sandra Bernhard, Culture Club, Scritti Politti, Whitney Houston, and Lydia Lunch. Bertei’s fir…
Vivification Exercises I
* Limited edition of 225 cassettes with hand stamped covers * Ka Baird’s Vivification Exercises, a recording for piano, voice, and electronics that references an invigorated consciousness, is primarily based on a presentation at Roulette’s Brooklyn theater in May of 2018. The event added to Baird’s history of performances that embrace the physical and visceral, though the musical, provocative sounds this time exorcised from both her body and the piano’s. Written, performed, produced and mixed by…
BBC Radio 1
* 2021 Stock. Limited Edition, Green/Black * Drag City presents BBC Radio 1 by OM. Recorded live at BBC Radio 1, Maida Vale, May 3rd, 2019. The songs continue to evolve; two each from the classic OM releases Advaitic Songs and God Is Good, encompassingly recorded and mixed with the pristine quality that BBC engineers (and OM) bring to recorded sound.
Dark Ballads
* Edition of 300 * Dark Ballads is the obvious title of this LP, as if this music pre-existed the duo that, without any other choice, was formed around it. Since then, Giotis Damianidis and Audrey Lauro have continued to advance along this straight line that runs through their inner landscapes.
Their music creates a "stretched" emotional space, which evolves in slow motion and captures the fragility of the tone, the tension of the path. Each stage of the record is a mineral evocation of the inti…
As Vgei Kapou Ayto
* Vinyl edition, limited to 200 hand-stamped copies * Twelve years since 2008, year zero in the documentation of Angelos Kyriou’s works, 2020 saw the long-awaited release of an expansive compilation of his music from the Agios Anthropos label (KLIMA). Rekem in its turn presents the edition at hand, a more current offering of where Angelos’ music sits today. A warm evening live in front of friends, a healthy 11min dose from the last few days of 2019, offers us the occasion for this rough gem.
Pan…
Soundscapes from Philoti, Naxos
Rekem Records presents an album of field recordings from the village of Philoti, Naxos, in the Cyclades. These recordings by anthropologists Panos Panopoulos and Yorgos Samantas offer us a tangible and pleasurable sonic image of highland Naxos, focusing on a range of acoustic stimuli that touches on the multiple aspects of everyday life, as well as those of ritual space and time, and the dynamic interplay between voices, natural sounds and music.
The material compiled sketches an acoustic profil…
Throat Mask
The self-titled debut from Throat Mask collects four improvisations from the duo that are built around random processes and hover constantly between collapse and coalescence. The recording sees Nathan Gray attempt to guide his unruly stack of sputtering and chiming digital automations while T. Kowalski responds with fm, digital and analog synthesis and sparsely gestural midi drums.Side A keeps returning to Gray’s voice, occasionally it’s recognisable but more often it’s faltering or shredded by …
Eliksir
* Pro-dubbed clear tape in smokey brown case, cover image printed on transparency film, insert card with a stamp * Alicja founder, painter DJ and problem child Tomasz Kowalski presents his first collection of confounding audio objects: Eliksir. The title track, centrepiece and key to the work as a whole, Eliksir is an augmented radio play that is loosely based around Alvin Lucier’s I’m Sitting in a Room. But instead of an intense focus on auditory phenomena, distraction and interruption divert t…
Shakuhachi for Latin Lovers
* Edition of 70 * Clive Bell’s roots in British experimental music run deep. Many will know him for his frequent contributions as a writer for The Wire magazine, while others will know him for his sonic explorations that date back into the 1970s, both solo as well as in collaboration with New Jazz Syndicate, Peter Cusack, Jac Berrocal, Steve Beresford, Jah Wobble, David Ross, David Toop, Mike Cooper, and countless others.Bell is an accomplished player of the shakuhachi (Japanese flute), khene (T…
Best that You Do This for Me
A 50-minute composition for string trio by the Japan-based musical pioneer and experimentalist. Commissioned by Anton Lukoszevieze of Apartment House, who perform it beautifully.
Brief interview with Anton Lukoszevieze
Why did you choose to commission a piece from Jim O'Rourke for Apartment House, and how did you know his work?
I have known of Jim for a long time, mainly through his work with Merce Cunningham’s dance company, who I also performed with at the very end of their time. But I had n…
Single Track
An extraordinary 7-part canon, which starts fast and gradually slows down across its 45 minute duration. Composed by the Berlin-based US composer Michael Winter, and performed by the leading Mexican new music ensemble Liminar.
Interview with Michael Winter
Single track is a really arresting piece that appealed to me immediately. At one level it’s obvious what’s happening – a 7-part canon that starts out fast and gradually slows down. But what else can you tell me about it?
In a way, the gradual …
A New Instability
In 2019, the power-acoustic musician Francisco Meirino presented A New Instability, a commission for the venerable Ina-GRM in Paris. Of course, this institution is the pre-eminent center for the research and study of electro-acoustic music dating back to the founding of Groupe de Recherches Musicales in 1958 by Pierre Schaeffer. To this day, Ina-GRM continues to be at the vangarde of the electro-acoustic composition, and it is quite an accomplishment and very appropriate for Meirino to receive s…