★KRAAK
Proud Princess Of A Brand New City
After several hugely impressive concerts, where the visuals from Kurt D\\'Haeseleer are almost as important as the music, Guillaume Graux or Tuk comes up with a first cd. \\'Proud Princess of a Brand New City\\' contains mostly finished versions of the tracks he used the first three years at his live performances. The main sources on the cd are guitars, most of them so heavily treated that you barely hear it\\'s a guitar. Even if it\\'s only a beat, it might be guitar. You never know on this rec…
S*CKMYP
S*CKMYP drops the spectator in a world continuously bombarded with digital fragmentation bombs. People wander through a kaleidoscopic labyrinth of trembling bodies and mutating buildings until they are swallowed by a yawning void. Lost pixels nestle like parasites under the skin and drag them through an everyday world that looks strange beyond recognition. THe film is a feverish dream, the loot of a nightly raid on suburban districts and new housing estates. A collection of the stolen dreams, fe…
Mechanica
Shifts is Frans De Waard. Famous for his ground-breaking releases on his own Korm Plastics/Bake/Microwave labels (all available as CDRs) and his work for Staalplaat (which he didn't found, contrary to popular belief) and from a thousand other projects as Goem, Beequeen and Kapotte Muziek. Shifts produces another angle of De Waard's minimal music. The guitar is the source of Shifts. After a string of 7"s, 10"s and 2 CDs, we are proud to say that Mechanica is one of his best. The album is a contin…
Adlib
He lives in Rostock, Germany and studies informatics. Petters combines perfectly the software computer culture with intensity. His music reflects so much emotion through electronic wires -- you start wondering why more electronica people don\\\'t succeed in the same way. Everything is done with a detailed precision which makes it difficult to relegate this to the background. Even if its \\\'ambient\\\', it still turns your brain around and hits you. Adlib is another moniker from the young Kristi…
Flick
Second one in the guitarimproseries (first one was Shifts). This Finish guy is pretty young but has a distinctive feel towards his guitarplay. Excerpts from his talents could be found on the Killa 7\\"s but here he is operating alone on his selfbuild guitar and other \\"soundlabs\\". It\\'s dark and quiet with lots of floating, hissing and inspired contructions. Every now and then a melody pops up which brings together the harmony between impro and a \\"listenable\\" experience. As for guitarpla…
The Highway\'s Jammed With Broken Heroes
Gas-station attendants around the world will rejoice at news of this final missive from Jason DiEmilio (aka Azusa Plane), a cleverly titled reminder of one of the Boss's most visionary & epic lines. Featuring two long tracks of cable glitch, amplifier hum and microphone bumping, this CD has such comedic aspirations that even Neil Hamburger will probably have to sit up and take notice. Thank you, New Jersey.
9 Solitaires
Dag Are Haugan is certainly for most people not the most common name. Being half of the legendary Norvegian outfit Alog made him one of the most original musicians of the last decade. At the start of our label we did carry his debut on Myke Droner stating it as “classic". A couple of years further we received this wonderfull demo. You can call it guitar-glitch if you want... The result comes close to a beatless Gas, a more guitar-driven Novisad, etc... Pressed on vinyl-only, with artwork from Ru…
Titles Of The Greatness Of Been
Floating of directly direction improvisation this record have almost no overdubs. Coming close to the abortion of sounds genuinely overlooked by contemporary artist, they succeed to use 'noise' as a base to build quite direct tracks. At times very soft and gently showing of a romantic side of things, followed by a psychiatric attempt to slaughter all neighbours. The general feel after listening to the album is gasping for breath. It took them 4 years to do this album of top guitar improvisation …
The Wide Album
It took Tim Wijnant two years to complete the successor of his debut-album Gravity=Love. All this resulted in a stream of ideas, influences which were put into this new album. This is a mature CD ranging him amongst the likes of Pimmon/Fennesz/Markus Schmickler. The Wide Album is a progressing work. Started out by collecting 'sounds' from different sources. Manipulated, and processed into rough tracks and fitted alongside one another until a definite version was completed and fine-tuned as a who…
Girls Beware!
JanuarY 2004. Two years after the highly acclaimed album “Rose-garden", the portables come up with their second full length. “Girls Beware!" starts where their previous album ended. De Portables developed a cult reputation during the years, mainly because of their many intense and always different performances. Against all recent trends, standards and expectations they do their thing; they play because they like playing. The quartet twists themselves during 11 songs a way between pop, post-rock …
Turning Dreams & Shifting Harbours
The Kidnapping Europe project was initialized by the artists Christina Clar (Paris, France) and Peter Jap Lim (Berlin, Germany) in 2001. Based on the "Europa Myth" (Zeus kidnapped the phoenician princess Europa and brought her to a continent which now has her name), the project aims to approach the topic of migration and the dreams, hopes and visions of migrants, in particular, from a contemporary perspective. In addition to their own work, which resulted in an installation that made its debut a…
Kaikkeuden Kauneus Ja Käsittämättömyys
A different beast from the spiritual and improvised stylings of the recent (vinyl-only) Sateenkaarisuudelma, this record is much more composed and more succinct – with ten gorgeous slices of hissing, crackling vinyl samples, small instruments, decrepit synthesizers, broken toys and vocals making up an album which flows perfectly. The effortless melodies (probably the most uplifting of the entire Fonal catalogue) and haunting vocals take you into an ethereal world of spirits and thick mist lullin…
Silmät Sulkaset
On the second full-length release by Kiila, the band gently conjures up mildly otherworldly tunes with a peaceful air and feathered eyes. What was once free-pop played by two is now free-folk played by seven. The language of the songs has reverted back to Finnish, and the human voices rest on a warm texture of sounds from an array of acoustic and electronic instruments. Carefully-arranged songs alternate with those improvised on the spot, all bearing the mark of a handcrafted article.
Shallow Water Blackout
On Tuk's second full length, the compositions sound heavier. The reason for this is the way this album was recorded. Songs were created and evolved mainly on stage instead of in his home studio. Playing regularly live added new elements to the music and giving it new angles in the meantime. De basic structure of most of the songs is based on seventies classic rocks songs, after which they were heavily manipulated, destroyed and built up again by herr Tuk. This is sonic wizardry in an extravaganz…
Hear Here Now
Rhythm Section is an occasional duo of Peter Jacquemyn and Tatsuya Nakatani who toured in the spring of 2007 in Europe. In Belgium they have been accompanied by Fred Van Hove on piano and accordion. '... The strong-minded participants in this event are not bound to let his happen, though. A thousand megawatts bassist and a percussionist of the same calibre will not let themselves be pushed to the background. They demand their role at the forefront, by making a hell of a racket for instance, espe…
Static
Improvising drone-rockers Bad Statistics hail from Wellington, New Zealand, hurling Nordic doom, kraut rock and feral skronk into an industrial blender, and delivering a noisy, prolonged earful of lethargic experimental nonsense. Vocalist and saxophonist Thebis Mutante sounds like Mark E. Smith with stomach ache on 'If I Were A Pint Of Milk', groaning and whinging his way through a moribund death rattle of a song, seeing out a twenty-one minute duration that feels approximately four times as lon…
III
LP version. III projects the atmosphere of Jack London and The Iditarod Trail Sled Dog onto a modern world ruled by technology. Devens brings us the most genuine melancholy contemporary pop music has seen since quite some time. This album leaves the underground scenery that is troubled by trends so often far behind and just shows us the pure essence of what Music has to be: raw emotions put to sound. With his third full album Bram Devens has once again amazed us with a masterpiece. In his usual …
Tout Ploie
él-g makes a strange mix of French ballads and avant-garde song-writing. A pig-headed approach of the French language and ingenious arrangments are the core business of this dude. Tout Ploie is a compilation of both the best tracks from previously released cdr’s and new work. él-g appears as a sort of modern day miniature version of Serge Gainsbourg on this debut-lp. The female singer, Charlene Darling, who accompanies him throughout the most part of the record only makes this comparison more ap…
Vallee de Dith
Ernesto González traded the Chavez regime for comfortable living in a dreary place called Waterloo, near Brussels. He picked up the guitar, practiced his Hendrix skills, got introduced to the world of scorching fuzz, demented kraut rock jams, drone lords and kosmik trance and decided he could as well do all that shit by himself. After his debut on Gipsy Sphinx, Vallée de Dith is his second official solo outing, leaving the drone in second position and focussing heavily on kraut rock work-o…
We need more space in the cosmos
The comeback we were all waiting for! Ever since his “Bruce Willis” album (Western Vinyl, 2003) Jürgen De Blonde mainly focussed on music for dance and theatre productions. Until recently when he relived his old synthesizer fetish. This finally resulted in “We Need More Space In The Cosmos”, an ode to lost hero’s such as Klaus Schulze and Jean-Michel Jarre. The album recalls eighties electronics, i.e. an era when kraut rock culminated into new space ages and cosmic television soundtracks. But st…