★De Stijl
Outside/Inside
Charlie Nothing was the fractured-psyche pseudonym of author, father, horsekeeper, organic farmer, beekeeper, philosopher and clown Charles Martin Simon, inventor of the dingulator (guitar sculptures made out of the metal from American cars). Charlie's only visible offering to the record buying public was really anything but. Due to its rarity, The Psychedelic Saxophone of Charlie Nothing, issued by Takoma Records in 1967, has been a source of consternation for in-the-know types for years. Outsi…
Earth
EARTH is a 2009 silent film by Ho Tzu Nyen, one of Singapore's foremost artists. The visually arresting film has been live-soundtracked by a number of artists (including Oren Ambarchi) in several locales, and after Black to Comm, a.k.a. Marc Richter's accompaniment at Berlin's Asian Film Festival and the Unsound Festival in Krakow (both in 2010), he decided to commit it to record. In Marc's own words: 'Most of the music was composed under the influence of heavy pain killers while recover…
Emotional Planet
Chris Rose's Robust Worlds has impressed us since first glimpse. He was actually barefoot, if you can believe that, and his set had the feel of a way more lysergic Kevin Ayers. It was freezing fucking cold and I'm pretty sure he wore a Hawaiian shirt. His debut LP is called Emotional Planet, and it's deceptively simple. Voice, guitar, some noisy shit, whatever. His playing is sick: fluid, unforced, warm, soothed and soothing. It's a bath you don't want to exit. Seriously, if yr going to play gui…
Tragic Pote B/W Jerusalem Stone
Aviram Cohen is a jerk. Who cares if he was in SIlk Flowers, Soiled Mattress and The Springs, or that he has a new project called Volunteers Park ? You can tell that his parents are immigrants. He’s a suburbanite from New Jersey, and now, another New Yorker with an attitude, who learned how to use a sequencer to program synths and drum machines, so that he can sing about how boring life can be. It’s like he’s creating all this atmosphere because it’s lacking in his life. It sounds like someone i…
Transitions
Having rattled the hinges with last year’s “In the Blink of an Eye†7-inch, C S Yeh (C. Spencer Yeh) flings open the door and steps inside with Transitions, his first full-length album of songs after years of establishing himself as one of Earth’s top humans in experimental music and unbound improvisation, both alone and in collaboration, on record and onstage. The effect Transitions has on you may or may not depend on your familiarity with Yeh’s past work; regard…
Wavelength
First Lady of Winds and Stars Samara Lubelski returns to her once and future label home for her sixth album, Wavelength, and the spheres harmonize at the news. Wavelength comprises a dozen new arrowed whispers, Samara's feathery touch on guitar and microphone now so at balance with the elements that the whole, her music and the air it enters, become inseparable. Don't be fooled by the persistent "psych-folk" labels she gets -- oh, they may be accurate as far as modern usage goes, and that scene …
Morning And Sunrise
At some point all great explorers, from Amundsen to Kishan Singh Rawat, come to an opening up and cast their minds across a big space. A clearing, a promontory, a look out from a place no one's been before. Jakob Olausson ventured deep on Moonlight Farm, his debut for De Stijl in the winter of 2005. His singular expression returns on Morning and Sunrise, an explorer's codex, a gaze through to what's more important and less seen. The path yet traveled and the sun arcing over it. Morning and Sunri…
In The Blink Of An Eye
C S Yeh was born in Taipei, Taiwan, repped Cincinnati for many many years and is now based in Brooklyn, New York. Musically, Yeh is monolithically active both as a solo artist and improviser as well as with Burning Star Core. He has made seemingly hundreds of recordings, and we've yet to find one rotten egg in the basket. Yeh has collaborated with an insanely varied list of people. If we were to actually drop these names, you'd be impressed / confused. But you have NOT heard the result of him wr…
Lose today
restocked!! Michigan trio Wolf Eyes are known for bursts of harsh noise, but they've also made lots of interesting music on the way to those climaxes-- during the pregnant pauses, eerie bits of calm, and gradual build-ups that explode into raucous release. Stare Case, the "blues roots" duo of Wolf Eyes' John Olson and Nate Young, deal primarily in that restrained territory, where minimalism and quietude bulge with possibility. On Lose Today, the implied eruptions never come, but always seem to b…
Mother of fire
restocked - AA krauty, rhythmic throb & a sort of gutterized/behead the prophet stance that once seemed to have run up & down the west coast. Both of these things are filtered through post-Spacemen sensibilities & fueled w/ violin, bass & drums